


The Prisoner

by AllTheBellsInVenice



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: 200 follower ficlets, Angst and Porn, Augment fertility, Domination/submission, F/M, Happily Ever After, Hate Sex, Mutual Masturbation, Pregnant Sex, Torture, Wall Sex, khanolly, now multichapter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-02
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-02-07 03:12:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 24,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1882953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllTheBellsInVenice/pseuds/AllTheBellsInVenice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>faye-tale said: Congrats on 200! Much deserved, here’s to many more. I’d love some khanlolly wall sex. If it’s included in someone else’s (no doubt much better) prompt, I’d be happy bunny ;)</p><p> </p><p>  <i>Nope, I declare that Khanolly wall sex deserves its very own post. SO THERE. ;)</i></p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [faye-tale](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=faye-tale).



> faye-tale said: Congrats on 200! Much deserved, here’s to many more. I’d love some khanlolly wall sex. If it’s included in someone else’s (no doubt much better) prompt, I’d be happy bunny ;)
> 
>  
> 
> _Nope, I declare that Khanolly wall sex deserves its very own post. SO THERE. ;)_

“I know you’re there. Show yourself.”

Instinctively, Molly flinched back from the sound of his voice echoing in the cavernous room beyond. She hadn’t even peeked around the door frame yet, but already, it seemed, he’d sensed her presence.  
“Come out,” the man she knew only as Commander John Harrison continued tersely. “I can hear you breathing. Into the workroom. Now.”

Ah. No use stealing away again. Why had she ever thought it would be a good idea to spy on this man? 

Oh, she knew the answer to that question far too well. Commander Harrison drew her irresistibly, mesmerized her like a cobra swaying before a mouse. She’d been in his presence only a handful of times, but the man’s magnetism was undeniable. Every person in the room felt it. A silence would fall in the enormous workroom when he raised his voice to speak. All eyes watched him as he confidently drew schematics, and his orders were carried out quickly and without question. 

There were few women on the team that Admiral Marcus had assigned to the commander. Molly suspected that Admiral Marcus had assigned women to the team only where no male experts were available. Why, she couldn’t say. But she had a guess. 

Rumor whispered that Commander Harrison barely left the workroom, almost never slept, and stayed up alone through the nights pushing his designs forward. So when she’d found herself at the complex late one night after finishing up some work, she’d felt a little tug of curiosity and thought she’d steal carefully down to the workroom to take a peek, to see if the rumors of his nocturnal activity were true. But her stealth, it seemed, had been in vain. 

“If you don’t step forward and explain your presence, I will have to assume you are an intruder bent on compromising the program and take appropriate measures.” His voice was cold and even, and there was no denying his sincerity. 

Molly stepped carefully around the doorframe, feeling unaccountably guilty. There he was, saturnine in his somber black uniform. He was standing at the schematics table, but he wasn’t even looking at her; instead, he was glaring at the image of a torpedo or missile that he was rotating in the air with steady motions of his big hands. Discomfited by the delay, Molly stayed as still as she could and waited for his attention. 

After an interminable moment, his gaze flickered to her, and his eyes narrowed. He dismissed the image of the torpedo with a wave and came around the tables, stalking up to her far too quickly. She couldn’t help but flinch back a little as he stepped right into her personal space. He was too tall. Her mouth went dry. 

“Doctor Hooper.” He put a hand on the wall behind her. His body smelled like thunder. “Why are you here?”

“I...I wanted...to see if you were awake,” she stuttered, cringing at how silly she sounded. “No, I mean...I mean…”  
“Curiosity, then,” Commander Harrison said, leaning down to look into her face and tilting his head to one side. “A...personal interest.”

“Curiosity, yes, I suppose. Not...personal, though.” Molly bit her lip. Her heart was thudding hard against her breastbone. This close, his magnetism roiled in the air, a hot smoke that she couldn’t help but inhale in great gulps. 

“Hm.” Commander Harrison leaned even closer, until his mouth brushed her hair. “Doctor Hooper,” he continued conversationally, “do you know how long it has been since I have touched a woman?” 

“Ah...no,” Molly replied, letting her eyelids drop closed. She felt his hands curve around her shoulders.

“An eternity,” he said against her forehead. “You’d never believe how many years. And do you know what happens to me if I cross that door right beside us, the one you just passed through?” He held up a wrist, and Molly saw, unmistakably, that what she had assumed was some kind of comm unit was, in fact, a tracking bracelet with no clasp. Pity stabbed at her heart, and she looked into his cold blue eyes, a hundred questions forming in her mind. 

“No, don’t ask me. Not now. First things first. Doctor Hooper, if you wish, you can step sideways and out that door. I can’t follow you and remain alive. But if you will stay…” He stepped back from her and, in one fluid motion, pulled his black uniform shirt over his head, tossing it to the floor. “I would very much like to give you what you so obviously desire from me.” 

Molly hesitated. All she wanted was to step toward him, put her hands on him. She really should walk out the door...It had been unprofessional of her to come sneaking down here in the first place, and this…

Her eyes traveled up his lean torso to his intensely focused face, so beautiful. And for the first time, she saw John Harrison’s full mouth curve into a feral smile. That sight shook her, tore at her better judgement, and she stepped helplessly forward and twined her arms around his neck. 

The commander gave a growl of pleasure and enfolded her tightly against his body, curving her against him. One hand cradled her head, tilting it back as he stooped to take her mouth. 

“Little thing,” he growled into her ear. “I want to see you.” His hands were pulling at her uniform, and Molly reached hastily up to open the clasps. She tore off her boots, then tugged the medical-blue uniform dress over her head and threw it to the floor, where it was quickly joined by her bra. She was bending to pull off her underwear when Commander Harrison---John---impatiently tore the scrap of fabric between his hands and kicked it away. 

Molly cried out softly when she felt his first touch on her pussy. “So wet already,” he said. She laid her head on his shoulder; her hands traveled over his chest, down his belly, skimming over the heavy lump below. 

John gritted his teeth at her touch. “Open my trousers,” he told her thickly, his fingers working her with obvious skill, despite the years of abstinence he claimed. “Free my cock. I don’t want to wait...I need to take you now.” 

She hurried to obey him, her hands shaking on the fasteners. When she reached inside his pants and took hold of his straining cock, John let out a terrifying sound. Not stopping to remove his boots or trousers, he seized Molly’s hips and hoisted her legs around his waist, then pressed her back against the wall, hard. 

Effortlessly holding her up with one hand, John caught her chin. “Look at me,” he growled, his black hair falling over his forehead as he stared into her eyes. “I’m going to enter you now.” She answered him with a little nod, and he reached down to position himself, then slid inside her with one thrust. 

Molly gave a great cry; she was suddenly full to aching, and he was giving her no quarter. She clung to his shoulders for dear life as he shoved at her, grinding his pelvis into hers.

Violent, bruising kisses. Her face scraped by his fine stubble. Orders snarled at her to cup her breasts, pinch her own nipples. Harder. The cool solidity of the wall behind her back, the hot pain of his teeth on her neck. Overwhelming, delirious, his scent filling her head. Before she knew it, he was wrenching an orgasm from her, chuckling darkly at her wails as if he’d won a victory over her. 

“My turn, little thing,” the commander told her with a rather frightening grin. His hands shifted their grip on her backside, and he tucked his hips under and rutted up into her body. Finally, he arched his back and gave a great roar that echoed throughout the vast room. 

He pulled her a little way from the wall, then sank down until he was kneeling on the hard floor with her on his lap. He held her tightly, his kisses still hungry on her mouth. 

“I’m not...who the Admiral says I am,” he whispered into her hair. 

“I know,” she replied. “And you’re a prisoner here. But who are you?” 

“Khan,” he told her. “My name is Khan Noonien Singh.” And he watched her face carefully as she made the connection, her eyes growing wide and her mouth dropping open in astonishment. He stroked her hair as he continued. “And you, Doctor Hooper, are going to help me to escape this place.”  
So commanding, so dangerously beautiful, this Khan, who was imprisoned here on pain of death, his true identity hidden under a great deception. Molly looked steadily into his eyes, the eyes of a natural-born prince. “Yes. Tell me what I need to do.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Yes,” Dr. Hooper said, laying her small hands on Khan's shoulders, her legs still spread over his lap. “Tell me what I need to do.” 

And just like that, the little doctor had submitted to his command. He hadn't needed to cajole, or threaten, or even repeat himself. She'd readily agreed to help him escape the Admiral. And all he'd had to do was fuck her hard against the wall of the vast workroom.

Well, Khan could certainly provide plenty of that sort of attention. 

Though it seemed to Khan that the look in her eyes had changed, grown soft, even before he’d taken her….when he'd shown her his cuff. The hated cuff that Khan could not remove, that would inject a powerful, unknown poison directly into his bloodstream if he dared to cross the workroom's threshold. Had it been the sex or the fact of his imprisonment that had convinced her? Both?

It didn't matter what had turned her loyalty, Khan decided. He had her. He'd keep her, use her lust and her pity. To escape the Admiral, maybe even take his revenge. 

Still, best to be safe. First, then, a test. 

“Cameras,” he growled into her ear, watching carefully as her big brown eyes darted around the ceiling. “The security cameras will have seen us. I’ve already discovered that I can't erase the footage from here.” A lie, but a useful one.

“Oh, Khan,” she gasped. “The Admiral. I'll lose my job for unprofessional conduct, face court-martial...”

Now for an equally useful stark truth. “You knew before that this project is highly classified. But my true identity is a far more serious matter. I am the Admiral's dirty secret,” Khan said. “He revived me to help him start a war, and he’ll do anything to keep it quiet. For what you've done tonight, Doctor Hooper, there will be no court-martial.” He watched as her eyes widened. 

“No turning back, then,” she said soberly, twining her arms about his neck.

“No. It seems you are, as they say, along for the ride.” Khan tightened his grip on her bottom. He was still eager...He could be hard again in a moment, ready to take her once more....

But she was standing, moving off him, bending to retrieve her torn underwear. Leaving him kneeling on the floor of the workroom, suddenly too cold without her body. Ridiculous. Khan got to his feet, pulled up his trousers.

“So. The cameras,” he said, lifting his eyes to the little doctor, where she stood, naked and red-faced, using her underwear to wipe his semen from her thighs. “You can erase the footage from a terminal outside the workroom, if you follow my instructions precisely.”

Speaking quickly, Khan outlined the necessary steps for her, nodding a confirmation after she repeated them back to him. So accurate, so fast. “What is your specialty, Doctor Hooper?” he asked, wondering at her skills of retention.

“Pathology,” she said, giving him a faint smile. “And for goodness’ sake, call me Molly.” She pulled her dress back over her head and closed the fasteners with a sigh of relief.

“What is a pathologist doing in Section 31?” Khan frowned. 

“Advising your scientists on how well your filtration system screens out certain infectious agents,” she replied. “Not at all well, in case you were wondering.” At that, he turned to face her, and she gulped at his expression. Time to apply a little affection, then. But make it believable.

“Return tomorrow during working hours and tell me how to improve the filters,” he told her. “And by your mere presence, I will know that you succeeded in erasing the footage. I’d really prefer it if you did not disappear. Molly.” He drew close, pulled her warm little body against his own. 

“I’ll succeed,” she said against his heart. She did not seem afraid. “But John,” she continued, “how will you escape? And where will you go after?”

“There is a complication,” Khan told her. “A significant one. The Admiral is holding my family hostage against my good behavior. I dare not make a move until they are safe.”

“Hostages?” Molly glanced down at his cuff, then up into his eyes. “How...awful. Where are they being held?”

“Very near this workroom. In cryostasis. Admiral Marcus apparently enjoys the irony of keeping them close to me.” Khan twisted his mouth. 

Molly’s eyes darkened at that. Then she frowned, thinking. “Cryostasis. It’s the other Augments, isn’t it. How can we smuggle them out?”

“I’ve designed a torpedo casing that will fit around a cryotube---” 

“No,” Molly cut in. “That’s insanely dangerous! No, absolutely not. I won’t work with you if you’re going to stuff people inside torpedoes.” Molly lifted her chin. “There’s got to be a better way.” 

He must not lose her. “If you have a better way to smuggle seventy-two cryotubes out of a military facility, I’d love to hear it,” Khan said, biting back his snarl.

“Seventy-two…!” Molly sagged, and Khan felt a spike of panic. Was it too much to stomach? Would she run away now, leave him to his fate?

Another appeal to her compassion, and quickly. “Molly. Would you like to see where I sleep?” he asked, pitching his voice low and mesmerizing.

“...Sleep?” Molly asked, confused by the seeming change of subject. 

“I do sleep, on occasion.” Khan stroked her hair. “But...look.”

He leaned over the display, touched a series of buttons. Nearby, a panel opened in the floor with a low whoosh. Molly peered into the open space, where a ladder led down into darkness, then up at Khan. 

“What…?” 

“Go and see,” Khan told her, leaning back against the display table and folding his arms. “I’ll stay here. There’s room for only one, really.”

With a last, doubtful glance at him, Molly stepped onto the ladder, then disappeared. Khan closed his eyes and waited for Molly’s unAugmented eyes to become accustomed to the dimness below. 

“Khan!” Molly’s cry of dismay floated up from the opening. “Oh, Khan. Oh, this is horrible.” 

“Yes,” he said, seeing in his mind the sight that greeted him through the clear walls of the tiny sleeping chamber every time he grew too exhausted to keep working. The cryotubes that held his family, each one dangling from the ceiling by a thin, straining cable over a drop of hundreds of feet. Seventy-two sleeping souls, jumbled every which way like a freakish mobile, clustered around the transparent chamber that depended from the ceiling like a drop of water.

“Lest I forget,” he muttered to the blackness behind his eyes. “As if I ever could.”

Then Molly’s arms were curving around his back, her cheek pressing against his chest. “The Admiral did this?”

“Outlandishly cruel, is it not? Marcus rarely unleashes his sadistic streak, but when he does...”

“I’ll help you save them, Khan,” Molly said. “We can do this. We’ll think of something.” 

“Molly,” Khan gasped. We, she’d said. To be no longer alone…Khan felt his eyes stinging. No, he must hide every weakness; she must not see him weep. He gripped her shoulders, turned her around, bent her over the table. 

“But the cameras...” she protested weakly, reaching up to grip the table.

“Molly,” he said again around the lump in his throat, stroking up her thighs and lifting her dress. Oh, her bare little arse, warm and so exposed without her ruined panties. “You'll just have to erase more footage.”

“Ah, of course,” she whispered. “Oh, Khan. Are you really ready again...so soon...?”

Khan gave a grim laugh, For answer, he tore open his trousers and let her feel his hot, hard length, stroking her pussy with it, enjoying the way she lifted her hips in supplication. 

This time, he entered her slowly, trying to concentrate on her slick tightness and to ignore the storm of emotion that was surging in his chest. Relief, hope, fear, lust, and a dark affection for this little doctor, who had somehow taken pity on him, who was now whimpering under his weight. 

Khan set his palms flat on the display table, hunched his shoulders over her, pushing, pushing against her soft bottom. Turning his face away from the cameras that he knew were watching, he buried his face in the sweet scent of her hair. She'd see, when she erased the footage. But this way, he could hide his expression and she'd never be the wiser. If he could control his breathing, tame the hitch in his voice...

Distract her, distract her. “Reach back,” he growled into her ear. “Spread yourself for me...let me in deeper.”

She moaned, and obeyed. Khan took advantage of her movement to scoop his hands under her body, gripping her breasts hard through the fabric. She'd be sore from before, when he'd ordered her to pinch herself, and it seemed this one responded beautifully to a little pain....

Yes, her moans were rising into wails, so sweet, and surely now she was thinking of nothing but what he was doing to her. Khan ground himself into her pussy, pressing his forehead against her nape. The unaccustomed nearness of another human being, her body so welcoming, so friendly...Khan squeezed his eyes shut, dropping his tears into her hair. 

“Khan,” he heard her say. “Are you...all right...?” Her hand left her buttock, reached back to his face---

Damn. Had he actually sniffled? He reared, released her breast, caught her hand before it could touch the wetness on his cheeks. 

“Hush, Molly,” he said, lowering his head once more, cursing his lapse. He gave her a sharp thrust, making her yelp, and tucked her hand up behind her back. Pushing, always pushing. “You're going to come for me twice more before I let you up. Don't struggle,” he said lowly over her keening cries. “I've decided.”


	3. Chapter 3

Molly crouched in the air shaft, looking out over the vast, dark chamber where the cryotubes hung precariously. She clutched the cargo shifter in both hands, hoping she would be able to suppress her trembling enough to use her phaser when the moment came.

It hardly helped that Khan was gazing down at her from his sleeping chamber, his hands flat against the glass, his eyes full of a helpless anxiety that wrung her heart even from this distance. 

Of course, Khan could do nothing from his position. The chamber's glass was unbreakable, and because of the cuff he could not leave the workroom to help her cut down the cryotubes. She was on her own, with seventy-two souls literally suspended in her hands. Molly took a deep breath, and engaged the gravity field of the cargo shifter. 

The first cryotube trembled as the field enfolded it; through her headset, she heard Khan's groan. The thin steel cable slackened as the cargo shifter took the cryotube's weight, and carefully, carefully, Molly rested the anti-gravity device on one knee. Her eyes locked on the cable, she pulled out her phaser and raised it until the cable was in her sights. No use hesitating. She fired. 

The energy beam sliced through the cable, and then the cargo shifter was all that held the cryotube over the fatal drop. Slowly, steadily, Molly lowered the cryotube down, all the way down to the distant floor. She heard the echoing thump when it came to rest. 

“God, Molly. Oh my god. That's one, one down.” Khan's voice was ragged in her ear. “Now the next one. We have to get them all down tonight.” 

“We will, Khan,” she said. She could hardly tell him not to worry. As Khan had explained, the delicate systems of the cryotubes could not withstand a fall from that height, nor could the occupants survive long in a damaged tube, even if they somehow remained uninjured. Lowering them one by one would be terribly precarious, and she had little time to complete the work, and no prospect of rest until each cryotube---and Khan himself---was safely out of the complex.

The only comfort Molly had was that if she did happen to drop one of the cryotubes, the hapless occupant would be unaware of the fall, or of the death that awaited at the bottom. 

Another down, and another. The first ten. The first twenty. And Khan never ceased his vigil as Molly worked, even though he could do nothing but bear witness. 

Once, her phaser blast overshot and cut the wrong cryotube free. Khan had screamed as the tube began to fall, a sound that blasted into Molly's skull and set her blood afire with adrenaline. By pure reflex, she released the cryotube she'd been holding up (setting it swaying and spinning and knocking into its neighbors), tilted the cargo shifter, and caught the falling cryotube, arresting its drop and bringing it safely, if rather too quickly, down to rest among its fellows.

It had taken Khan many minutes to calm down. 

The man was a cipher. Hard as stone one moment, visibly suppressing violent emotions in the next, Khan had presented as many faces to her as there were days in the month since that first night in the workroom. Sometimes he was cold, authoritative, machine-like in his efficiency, especially as they went over their plans. At other times he became gruffly affectionate, as he had that first night. 

He'd worked her hard until he was satisfied, with her pleasure and his own. It had taken an excruciatingly long time, and Molly had tottered a bit as she'd stood upright once more. Khan had supported her as she balanced on shaky knees.

“You'll need to use a contraceptive,” he'd said in his direct way, cradling her against the hard planes of his chest. “Something to stop you ovulating.”

“What?” She'd looked up at him then, at those red-rimmed blue eyes in a terribly pale face. “I use the Corteo barrier---”

“Not a barrier,” he'd said. “It won't be enough.” 

And it hadn't been. She should have listened. Just this morning, Molly had received an alert from the health monitor in her toilet. She was pregnant. She didn't yet know what she would do. 

Of course, she'd said nothing to Khan. The man had clearly been beside himself with terror when she'd appeared in the workroom this evening, holding the cargo shifter and the black-market phaser she'd procured. No need to add another problem to his long list. Not just yet.

Had it been that first night, or one of the few other stolen nights she'd spent in his arms in the previous month? She'd come to crave the roughness of his touch, the iron control he took when she gave herself to him. 

The first night that she'd returned to him, he had been all business. He'd listened to her ideas, asking terse questions and almost cross-examining her when she'd told him what she could do, using her position as a pathologist, to rescue his people. She'd left him standing still as a statue, staring at the floor, his mind plainly hard at work analyzing the plan she'd put forth. He hadn't seemed to hear her when she told him goodbye, and left to erase the footage that showed them talking alone together. 

But the next night, he'd pulled her into the workroom, clamping his hand over her mouth before she could say a word, and silently ordered her to descend the ladder into his sleeping chamber. She'd lain down on the narrow bed, and he'd stood over her, stripping her bare before kneeling in the scant space at the foot of the ladder and pulling her pussy to his hungry mouth. She hadn't let herself look into the darkness beyond the glass. 

For many hours he'd worked her, with mouth and cock and hands, worked her until she was sore and sated, bruised and glowing, and entirely his. 

“It's a good plan,” he'd told her in the small hours of the morning, as she'd lain drowsing inside the long curve of his body. “I am grateful. Molly.” 

And she had said nothing, just pressed the big hand that splayed over her heart. She knew that when she next ran her fingers through her hair, she would feel again the wetness of his tears.

After that, she'd returned to Khan as often as she dared, to spend an hour or a night under him, always under him. He gave her everything she longed for, after he'd made her beg for it. He laughed when she wept with the intensity of her body's sensation, counted each of her climaxes as a personal victory. Molly had never felt such peril in a lover's arms, nor ever felt so safe. 

And now, here, she held power over Khan's heart and soul as she slowly, torturously maneuvered each cryotube down to the distant floor, her knuckles whitening over the cargo shifter. 

Hours, the most agonizing hours of her life, as one by one, she lowered all of the cryotubes to safety. All but one. 

“No, not that one,” Khan said into her headset, gesturing to the final cryotube. “It's empty. That's my own tube. We'll leave it here for Marcus to discover.” Molly heard the grim chuckle in his voice. 

“Are you sure that's wise?” Molly asked. “We may need it later...”

“I'm never going back into stasis,” Khan said, resolute. “Never. Now for the second stage. No time to waste.”

“Yes, Khan,” Molly said, folding her aching legs once more to reach farther back into the tube. Pulling with all her weight, Molly tugged the portable transporter device closer to her and tapped in the coordinates. 

“Balance that transporter carefully, Molly,” Khan called from his position above. “It's really too heavy for you. You mustn't drop it when you rematerialize.”

“I know,” Molly said patiently. “I won't.” She pressed the button, and a storm of golden particles danced around her body. 

And suddenly, here she was on the floor of the vast room, lowering the immensely heavy transporter device to the floor. Khan's sleeping chamber was only a glowing spot overhead, and all around her lay the cryotubes. 

Molly checked her watch, and gulped. Khan was right; there was not a moment to lose. Quickly, Molly went to the nearest cryotube and draped her body over it, tugging the transporter along with her. She entered new coordinates and pressed the button once more.

“Damn,” she muttered as she and the cryotube rematerialized in a deserted hallway of the long-term body storage facility, deep in the basement of London's largest hospital. “I forgot the cargo shifter...” Not a great way to start the process. She'd have to leave the cryotube alone for a moment as she went back to retrieve the device. 

“...Cargo shifter!” Khan's voice crackled in her ear as she arrived back at Section 31 and her headset came back into range. 

“I know,” she said, lowering the transporter for a moment and hooking the anti-gravity device to her belt. Khan was speaking urgently into her ear, something about _efficiency,_ but Molly did not waste another moment to remonstrate with him. Instead, she slung her body over another cryotube and pressed the transporter's button.

For another age, Molly slogged through the process of transporting each cryotube to the body storage facility, where evidence from cold cases was preserved, sometimes for years. She'd registered a hundred wall storage units using false credentials and identities, and now she shifted each cryotube into a storage unit, locking each hatch securely. Every time she returned to the vast chamber at Section 31, she left the hallway dark and cold, the cryotube sealed away. Back and forth, back and forth, the heavy transporter dragging at her, making her back ache terribly. 

The final ten, the final three. And then she was done. The cryotubes were safe. 

 

Molly appeared in the workroom an hour later, having sunk the transporter unit deep into the Thames and hurried to Section 31 on foot, cursing the gray light of predawn. She'd keyed her way into the building, well knowing that she was doing so for the final time. She returned to find Khan sitting at the display table, his cuff still firmly around his wrist, surrounded by discarded tools. Pale and trembling. 

“I can't remove it, Molly.” He looked up at her, his eyes hollow. “It's too well designed. I've had a few near misses already. Can't deactivate the needle, can't drain the poison, can't bypass the programming. There's almost no time left to exit the building. We'll have to use the last option.”

“Khan,” Molly said soberly, her fingers trembling with more than fatigue around the handle of the vacuum flask she carried. “Are you sure you'll be okay? If we do this?”

“Not at all sure,” he said thickly. “Or I might have tried it sooner. My cells do regenerate under most circumstances, but this...it could mean permanent dismemberment.” 

Molly set down the flask and pulled Khan into her arms. Unresisting, he slumped against her chest. “No time to lose, Khan,” she murmured into his thick black hair. 

“Then let's do it,” Khan said loudly, a hard edge to his voice. He pushed her away and stood upright, kicking away his chair. He set his hand onto the edge of the table so that his cuffed wrist was over the floor. “No time for protective wrapping. Open the vacuum flask, Molly.” 

“Do you want to hold the hammer, or shall I?” Molly asked, venting the first seal with shaking fingers.

“I will,” Khan said, lifting the heavy sledgehammer in his other hand. 

In a moment, Molly had the flask open. “Ready?” she asked him. 

Khan's mouth was firm. “Do it,” he said.

And Molly tipped the flask to pour liquid nitrogen over the metal of the cuff. 

At first, the clear liquid boiled away from the cuff. Molly kept pouring, knowing that she'd need to cool the metal until the drops no longer skidded away on contact. Despite her care, some of the liquid nitrogen spilled over onto Khan's hand and arm. He gave a great roar through the smoky vapor, but Molly gritted her teeth and kept pouring until the flask was empty. She pulled away, and Khan immediately set his arm onto the table and brought the sledgehammer down onto the frosted cuff. 

The metal broke open around Khan's wrist, and Molly gave a cry of joy, a cry she quickly choked off when Khan pulled away the pieces, smoking with the nitrogen, and drew a thick needle out of his frozen flesh. He looked up at her then with stricken eyes, and Molly saw the needle hole weep a single drop of inky black.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warmest thanks to Khanolly Captain Miz-Joely for timely help with the heart of this chapter!

Khan looked down at his wrist again, pale with cold and the long occlusion of the cuff. The oily liquid trickled from the ragged puncture wound down toward the heel of his hand, and he could already feel the poison burning its way up his arm and pooling frigid in his heart. How much time did he have? 

“Molly,” he gasped as his vision began to sparkle. “The poison---” He was an Augment, built to battle threats from within as well as without, but--

The little doctor already had her tricorder out and was scanning him. “Oh, Khan,” she said, her elfin face gone as pale as he felt. “Don't talk. You should sit down. Try not to move about too much---”

But as her tricorder beeped, Khan was already stumbling for the door, banging painfully against the frame as he finally, finally passed its threshold. If he was to die, he'd die free, and not in that hated workroom, his prison. Not in this building, Marcus's domain. He'd make it outside, die on the pavement if he must, but not here. 

“Khan, stop. Wait a moment,” he heard at his side, and there was Molly, slinging his arm over her shoulder. She was half his weight, surely, but her efforts did seem to be helping him. She pressed a hypospray to his neck as they made their way down the hall to the lifts. 

“What's that,” he muttered as she pocketed the instrument. His mouth was so dry... 

“Chelation therapy,” she gasped, slapping at the button that called the lift. “That oily black stuff---I've never seen anything like it, but it smelt metallic---”

“Could be nanotech,” Khan said. If she replied, he couldn't hear it over the rushing in his head. “Molly. Don't take me to hospital. First place he'll look.” 

“We're not going to a hospital, we're going to my office,” she seemed to say, but that couldn't be right. 

“No. No. Got to get out.” And Khan roared in frustration as she shoved his body into the corner of the lift, leaning against him to hold him up. 

“I'm going to get you out of here, Khan,” she said against his cheek. “I promised, and I will.”

**

“Please don't fall, Khan,” Molly begged, pressing him into the corner with all her might to keep his body from sliding to the floor. “I won't be able to lift you again. But if we can make it to my office---”

The lift doors opened, and Molly pulled at Khan, who groaned and retched against the wall. “Time to walk, Khan. Down this hall. Just a bit farther.” 

Khan's eyes were wandering blearily over her face, the grey carpet, the bright lights overhead. “Molly. You.”

“Yes, Khan, it's me. We need to walk forward now.” Molly pulled hard at him, stumbled under his impossible weight as he sagged over her. If only she'd thought to bring the cargo shifter. 

“You, too small,” Khan babbled. “I should leave you alone, but I can't. Brave. You don't. You shouldn't let me.”

“Be quiet, Khan,” she murmured, her eyes on the second doorway to the right. “Walk for me. We've got to get through this doorway. Come on!” 

Her heart was hammering in her ears, and the way Khan's muscles kept twitching against her hands terrified her. Soon he'd begin seizing in earnest, and he was far too heavy for her to handle alone. 

“My body, give it to my crew,” Khan said, turning his face into her hair. “And tell them...everything. For this they'll...love you. As much as I. Molly.”

“Hush, Khan,” Molly said, her face reddening with more than exertion. He was delirious, surely. “There won't be a body. Just...walk!”

Somehow, somehow, she half-hauled, half-guided him through the door of her modest office, where she'd left preparations for several scenarios. What mattered now was the large suitcase that lay open on the floor. “Sit down in the suitcase, Khan,” she said in his ear, though he gave no indication of hearing her. “Please, just---”

He stumbled to one knee, kept falling. Molly, acting fast, shoved him sideways so that his torso landed more or less inside the suitcase. “Oh, thank god.” Molly quickly folded up the tall man, gathering his heavy limbs until he was inside. 

Trembling, Molly looked down at Khan as she pulled the top half of the suitcase over his still body. His breathing sounded horrible, he needed oxygen, intubation, he shouldn't be curled up and sealed inside a suitcase. But she had no choice. Her hands shook as she closed the lid and pressed the button to engage the small antigravity unit. Tugging at the handle, she pulled the suitcase out of the office and walked to the lift again. 

In moments she was emerging onto the pavement, into the early grey light. Using the last of her reserves, Molly forced herself to stop shaking, not to look furtively at the faces of the few early pedestrians. To walk calmly, just as if she weren't pulling a dying fugitive in a suitcase behind her. 

But she couldn't walk long like this; she was far too tired, and as dawn broke over London, the earliest commuters were appearing in the streets. She couldn't return to her own flat, of course; she'd known she couldn't. She dared not take Khan to hospital, but clearly he'd die without treatment. She had her tricorder, her hypospray, a few other odds and ends...It would have to do. 

She crossed the street, where a high-rise hotel, catering mostly for business travelers, loomed directly opposite the building they'd just emerged from. Perhaps Marcus and his people wouldn't think to look for them here, so close.

The gleaming doors whooshed open. Molly gulped once, then approached the front desk, where a woman who looked far too alert for the time of day called a greeting. 

“Flight just come in?” the desk clerk asked, looking Molly over without much interest. Molly forced herself to meet the woman's eyes.

“From Titan,” Molly said, and fumbled for her forged identification and the unfamiliar credit chip. “I'd like a room for twelve days, if you can manage it.” She'd remain here no longer than she had to, but booking a long stay might avoid attracting the attention of Marcus's people, who seemed more likely to investigate hotel bookings of just one night. 

“I think we can do that for you,” the woman said, incurious, looking at her screen. “Good thing it isn't convention season. Just you?”

“Yes,” Molly said, trying her hardest not to stutter. “But I'd like a double, if you have one. Room to unpack my samples.” She nodded down to the suitcase, praying that Khan wouldn't choose this very moment to groan.

A few nerve-racking minutes later, Molly locked the room's door behind her with a gasp of relief. Turning quickly to her case, she boosted the antigravity to bring it up to the level of the bed, and opened the seal. 

Khan tumbled out onto the bed, white as marble. His eyes were open, fixed on nothingness. A fine tremor shivered through every muscle as Molly hurried to arrange his leaden limbs. 

Turning to her medkit, Molly began to weep helplessly as fatigue clawed at her emotions. The kit was pathetically inadequate. She had so little to work with, and she didn't even have a way to discover what had poisoned Khan. Her tricorder told her that Khan's blood pressure was dangerously low, his pulse was erratic, and his brain activity was looping every which direction, combining sickening lulls with sudden bursts of frenetic activity. 

Well, she must do what she could, though she was nearly staggering with tiredness. Fluids, then, and something for his heart rate. She set up her one IV bag, hanging it from the bedpost, and gave him another hypospray. She didn't let herself wonder what she'd do if Khan died here in this hotel room, which seemed more and more likely as his respiratory rate continued to fall. 

“Khan,” she sobbed, slapping his cheeks, her head beginning to swim. “Come on, Khan. Stay with me. Please!”

But clearly he could not hear her, and her tricorder gave her grimmer news each time she checked it. Finally she threw the instrument down onto the bed and covered her face with her hands. 

“Khan, you can't die. You can't,” she said into the darkness behind her palms. “I'm a fugitive too, and now I...I'm pregnant, and you can't leave me alone to deal with all of this. Please...” 

She curled up next to his body. Oh, he was horribly cold. She pulled him close, slung a leg over his to warm him, babbled helplessly in his ear. “Khan, no. Not like this. I've never met anyone like you. You scare me, but I love you, I can't help it. Damn it, Khan, don't, don't die. Please.”

And Molly clung to him until her exhausted body finally lapsed into unconsciousness, while Khan grew colder, and still colder underneath her. 

**

Khan drifted in darkness, burning and freezing, empty, crowded and smothered by a towering something that filled the room, his head, the universe. A blue universe, a great bell tolling far too loud, his teeth rattling with the horrifying sound of it. 

Cold, endless cold and stillness, here in this dark place, dark and silent. Had he wakened, then, alone in his cryotube? Had he died there without waking?

No, he'd wakened already, he remembered. The sting of the needles, the light that hurt his eyes, the sound of the restraints ripping as his arms easily broke through. The screaming. The running footsteps. The feel of metal against his skin, the sheen of unbreakable glass under the chilly lights. Marcus. 

Admiral Marcus! The way he'd gloated over Khan as he huddled, shivering and still sick, on the floor of his cell. His pitiless eyes as he'd informed Khan of just how alone he was in this new century, and what he'd be required to do for Marcus to ransom his family, his crew. That delicious daughter of the Admiral's, perhaps Khan would have her, steal her heart, tell her father how much he'd enjoyed her before killing him.

The sleek curve of the armor plating on his new ship, the gleam of black metal that hid a hellstorm of his own advanced weaponry, the endless days in the workroom, the endless nights. The frozen faces behind the glass, pale and brown and olive and dusk and deep. Faces whose frost-bleared features he could never quite pin down to individual crew members, as hard as he peered through the transparent walls of his sleeping quarters. Maddening.

And then her, finally her, the curious little doctor with her meek smile, her soft skin, she'd given herself to him, so completely. Her arms open to him, holding him against her small body, he'd hidden his tears, his helpless gratitude. Something hidden in her too, surely, some righteous or rebellious streak deep inside, to ally herself with him, the renegade. She'd given up so much to help him, why? Her great brown eyes, he could see them now, hollow, wide with fear or disbelief. Her narrow shoulders, she looked cold but he couldn't move to reach her. 

“Molly,” Khan said, more faintly than seemed logical. “Why are you crying?” 

“Alive, you're alive. Khan,” she sobbed, kissing his face over and over. “You fought it off, came through the poison. It wasn't enough, they couldn't kill you.” Fierce triumph shining in her eyes. 

“How long? Where...” His mouth was full of stinging ice.

“Four days,” she said from somewhere above him. “We're in a hotel, somewhere safe. Quiet now, Khan. Just rest for now.”

Khan turned his head, lifted his leaden arm. “My hand...” Black patches of dead flesh curved around his wrist where the liquid nitrogen had killed the superficial tissue, but his hand, his hand was still there, the flesh pink and well oxygenated. 

“Yes,” Molly said, glancing at it. “You'll scar, maybe lose some sensation or function, but you've kept the hand itself.”

“Won't scar. No loss,” Khan said, but the effort was too much, and his eyes slipped closed. “Augments...” he said to the blackness behind his eyes, slipping further away from her every second. “Augments do not scar.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Lead poisoning.”

Khan spoke to the soiled duvet of the hotel bed, his head hanging between his knees. He ran large white hands through his dirty hair, then lifted his face to the blank expanse of the ceiling. He didn’t look at Molly where she sat, hands clasped, her mouth sour with the taste of the news she’d just given him. 

“Lead poisoning,” he said again. “An admirably insidious form of violence against someone whose greatest power is his mind.”

“Your blood levels are near zero now,” Molly said, reaching a hesitant hand to touch Khan’s shoulder. “I don’t know if you remember, but I started you on chelation therapy before we even left the facility, so you’ve been excreting it. But, Khan, on that first day, your blood levels were…something like 200 micrograms per deciliter. That’s…far beyond fatal.” She pulled back her hand, almost wary of him now, this strange man who should have died.

Khan gave a hollow laugh. “Augments have somewhat of a blind spot in their resistance to toxins. Oh, that Marcus did his research. So simple, so crude---but very effective. Oh, that’s his signature, yes.”

“Oh, Khan. It’s likely you have neurological damage,” Molly whispered, her mouth turning down in misery. “Motor neuropathies, maybe impaired, um, fertility---”

Khan’s lip twitched. “Augment male fertility has proven to be a menace. In the end I don’t care about anything but my intelligence. Without it, I’m...” He pressed his mouth closed, lowered his head again, not seeing Molly’s flinch.

Composing herself, Molly looked down at the medical tricorder in her lap. “Your liver and kidney function are back to normal, which is…astonishing. But I can’t tell how the lead affected your brain. Not with only this equipment, and not without a baseline scan to compare.”

“No baseline scan exists. I’ll just have to find out for myself.”

Khan spread and fisted his hands a few times, experimentally. Then he swung his long legs out of bed, ignoring Molly’s yelp of protest, and stood upright, solid and steady. “Where are my clothes?”

“Bathroom.” Molly inclined her head. “That way.”

Anxious, Molly watched her patient walk across the room, his steps slow but graceful as ever. She shook her head in wonder, a million questions racing through her mind. 

After a moment, Molly heard the shower start up. “Be careful of your wrist,” she called. Another wonder, that. The dead flesh of his liquid nitrogen burn had been falling away, the new tissue underneath showing pink and raw and impossibly perfect. 

Augment cellular regeneration. Molly had done a bit of furtive research into the phenomenon while Khan had lain unconscious beside her. Likely it was the only thing that had saved his organs, kept him alive through the worst of the poisoning. Khan’s body, it seemed, was incredibly hard to kill. Whether his mind had survived intact remained to be seen. 

Molly leaned over her tricorder and gave a small sob.

***

Khan leaned a long hand against the wall of the shower bay and bent his head, feeling the spray pound against the back of his neck and letting it drip from his lashes, his open lips. The hot water was exquisitely painful on the raw flesh of his wrist. His body felt heavy and sore, but was that from the poisoning or his days of immobility? There was an odd ache in his chest. Could be anything. 

He took a long breath of the damp air, then shut off the water. Stepping carefully out of the shower bay, he swiped a clear band across the steam of the mirror and regarded himself. 

Adult male human, pale, dark-haired. Strong, tall, well nourished. A sparse patch of black body hair, now matted with moisture. Cold blue eyes looked back at him critically, trying to perceive any deficit from the poison. He closed his eyes, pondered his own mind in the quiet. If his brain had been damaged, could he even perceive his own diminishment? 

He lifted his hands. Were his fingertips tingling with neuropathy? Did his feet feel cold from the tile, or was it a deadening of sensation? His body had always been the weapon that had enforced the will of his mind, but now, would he lunge forward only to stumble? 

And would _she_ see his doubts, his failures, and scorn his ruination?

Doctor Hooper. Molly. He’d given her pleasure, seen to it that she was lavishly satisfied every time she came to his arms. It was all he could offer her in return for her help. And had he been able to flee Earth as he’d planned and leave her free, he would have considered the trade a fair one. But now… 

In order to save him, to watch over him after his poisoning, she’d walked away from a job at Starfleet, her career, her whole life. More, she’d set herself against Section 31, become a fugitive along with him. Even now, without doubt, they were hunted. 

Why had she done all this for his sake?

Khan opened the bathroom door, walked quietly toward the little doctor. She stood by the window, her back toward him, arranging medical supplies in a case. She didn’t notice his approach until he curled his hands around her shoulders. 

She gasped then, and froze. “Khan?” she whispered, and his heart gave an odd lurch. He’d frightened her.

“Yes, it’s me,” he told her, trying for tenderness. “Not Section 31. They haven’t found us yet.” 

She turned, slipped her arms around his back. “No, they haven’t. And you’re alive, against all odds,” she said against the wet skin of his chest. “We’re doing rather well, aren’t we, all things considered.”

 _We,_ again. “Thanks to you,” he replied, bending his head to inhale the fresh scent of her hair. It had been her cleverness, her meticulous preparation, her courage that had saved his life and kept them both hidden. 

Suddenly, he wanted her with a fury he could not contain. Nor could he hide his arousal from her, standing so close. A part of him rejoiced that he could feel such ardor, so soon into his recovery.

But no, he could not take her. Not now.

“Khan,” she breathed, her eyes alight on his as she pressed against his burgeoning hardness. “That’s one more effect of lead toxicity you’ve escaped. You…you’re amazing.” Her small hand slipped down his belly. 

“No,” he said, and pulled away. “I cannot. There’s still lead in every fluid of my body, Molly,” he told her, hating every word, hating the stricken look in her eye. “I won’t expose you to that.”

Molly blinked. “You don’t need to. Khan, come back.” She sat down on the bed, held out her arms. “Lie down with me, if you want to. Please?”

***

Khan turned back toward her, his skin shining in the grey light of the window. His expression was unreadable, guarded. 

“Please,” Molly said again. “At least let me hold you.” This poor, lonely man.

With a hesitancy that broke her heart, Khan stepped toward her, sat down again on the bed where he’d lain unconscious for so many harrowing days. Molly shook her head to dispel that image of him, so still and deathly pale, and ran her hands over his warm flesh. 

“I can feel your pulse under your skin. It’s bounding,” she said, pressing her hand over his heart. “And you’re flushed, just as you always are when we…I want you, Khan,” she said frankly. “Please touch me.”

A long moment passed. Then, for answer, Khan reached out and tore her blouse open, then shoved her backward onto the bed. Before she could cry out her surprise, he’d moved over her and covered her mouth with his. 

A dry kiss, but bruising; almost by reflex, she brought her hands up to push him away a little, but he caught her wrists and pushed them back, hard, against the bed. 

“Want me, do you,” Khan growled against her neck. Still holding her down, he bent his wet head and nuzzled aside one soft cup of her bra. He scraped his teeth against her nipple, and then Molly did cry out. 

“Ah! Yes, Khan,” she heard herself saying. “Yes. Please.”

Abruptly, Khan released her wrists and rose to kneel at her side. “Molly. After we first met…after I took you so hard against the wall of the workroom…you came back to me often, but didn’t dare return every night. Tell me truthfully, now. On the nights we spent apart, did you…touch yourself?” 

“Oh, Khan,” Molly said, reddening. She lay as he’d flung her down, unprotesting as he swiftly drew off her skirt, her underwear.

“I’ll know if you’re lying,” Khan continued, his voice low and dangerous. “Answer me. Did you touch your pussy, when you were alone in your bed?” 

“Yes,” she whispered. “Oh, yes.” She hadn’t been able to stop herself. 

“I thought so. Show me.”

“What?” She looked up at him in shock. 

“Show me how you touched yourself, Molly, while you were thinking of what I’d done to you. Open your legs.”

Shivering a little, Molly obeyed him. Hesitantly, she let her right hand steal down her belly, aware every second of his gaze, like a weight on her body. With the smallest of moans, she stroked her middle finger delicately down her wet slit.

“Beautiful, Molly.” Khan’s eyes followed the motion of her hand. “Such a gentle touch, though, for a hungry little cunt such as yours.” He settled close beside her, his hard cock rising from between his parted thighs. “Did you really tickle yourself like that while you thought of me?”

“Um. Not for long,” Molly breathed. “I’d imagine your touch…”

“And I am not gentle, am I,” Khan said, lowering his mouth to her breasts once more. “Tell me what you’d think of, what you’d do to yourself.”

“I’d think of your face, your voice. I’d imagine you forcing me to the floor. Mounting me. And just pushing inside me. And as I thought about that, I’d begin to rub myself…very hard.” Molly closed her eyes.

“Mm, yes. I confess I’m in the habit of simply taking what I want. Funnily enough, I always find an eager, wet welcome.” 

Molly felt him reach, and gasped as she felt his fingers pushing slowly, unstoppably into her pussy. Oh, his hands were big. She moaned aloud at the sweet stretch inside her. 

“Good girl,” Khan murmured. “Open to me. That’s right.”

He worked her mercilessly for many minutes, dipping in and out of her body, all the while ordering her to stroke her clit. She longed to beg for his cock---the words hovered on her lips---she ached to feel his crushing weight, his raw power holding her as he filled her again and again. Fleetingly, she wondered whether the replicator would be able to supply some kind of sheath, like the ancient contraceptive---

“You’re so lovely, Molly,” Khan told her, his eyes avid. “On your back before me. Pushing against my fingers. Shameless.”

He drew back his hand, and Molly whimpered, bereft. Then, in a sudden movement, Khan slung a leg over her body so that he kneeled over her. His cock, heavy with desire, bobbed inches from her lips. 

“Look at me, Molly,” Khan told her, and held her eyes as he slicked his palm, wet with her fluids, over his hard length. “You’re going to keep touching yourself, with both hands now. You’re going to watch me stroke my cock, and you’re going to come for me.”

“Yes, Khan,” Molly sobbed out, blushing even harder now as she reached her other hand down her belly, between his thighs, to obey him. His lovely cock was so near---she wanted to kiss him, lick him, take him in---

She heard Khan chuckle, just before he thrust two fingers of his free hand into her mouth. Startled, Molly gave a muffled squeal. 

“Such a good girl, Molly. So eager to suck.” Slowly, he stroked her tongue. “Show me what you want to do for me, sweet one. What you want me to feel. My delicious Molly.”

Giving herself over, tossing away her last shred of shame or embarrassment, Molly drew eagerly on the invading fingers. She savored his ragged gasp of excitement as he pulled slowly on his erection, watching her all the while. 

Khan leaned in close to whisper against her cheek, his hand giving her mouth no quarter. “I’ll tell you a secret, my Molly. On those nights, I thought of you too.”

“How I wanted you,” he continued, dropping a kiss on her brow. “How badly you distracted me, kept me from my needful work. I couldn’t help but indulge myself. Thinking of your sweet silky skin, how willing you were to open for me. Your soft little bottom. Yes. The way you shuddered when I first penetrated you. Yes. Yes.”

Molly moaned around his fingers, arched her back, and fell over the edge. Dimly, she heard Khan calling her his good girl, his sweet little queen, and felt his warm semen painting her breasts, her belly. Opening her eyes as pleasure coursed through her, she met Khan’s icy blue gaze as he spilled out the last of his orgasm onto her skin. 

“Oh, Molly. Molly.” Letting his fingers slide out of her mouth, Khan sagged over her; as distracted as he was, she wriggled her arms free just in time. Heedless of his fluids, Khan pressed his skin against hers, scooping her up to hold her close. 

“So tired,” he murmured in her ear. “No stamina…”

“Go to sleep now, Khan,” Molly whispered, stroking his hair. “Superhuman or not, you’re not done healing.” 

“No,” he mumbled. “Might never be done. Molly. Thank you, Molly.” He rolled to one side, then collapsed beside her and was still, his face suddenly gone pale and creased with pain. 

“You’re alive, Khan,” she whispered to him. “So very alive. More than you know. And as long as you’re alive, there’s hope for you. For us.” Quietly, secretly, she touched her belly, imagining she could feel a tiny flicker there.


	6. Chapter 6

On the sidewalk Khan waited unmoving, watching the door of the Kelvin Memorial Archive. Around him the life and bustle of downtown London continued, ignorant of what was about to happen here, unaware that chaos and destruction was moving ever closer in the form of a signet ring and a glass of clear liquid. 

Viciously radioactive, the metal of that signet ring, likely to gravely sicken young Thomas Harewood if he were to carry it for longer than an hour. But that hardly mattered, of course, since Harewood and the greater part of Section 31 would soon be well beyond such considerations. 

Khan’s mouth hardened. Death and violence, yes, but the number of lives to be sacrificed was still far, far smaller than the body count of his own people, centuries ago on Old Earth. Uncountable thousands had been murdered, victims of the primitive bombs that had destroyed every palace, government building, and living compound the Augments had held, all over the world. 

Surely humanity owed him a few lives, in the name of rescuing the few Augments they hadn’t murdered.

Now, where was Harewood? Ah, there. 

To the man’s credit, his gait was steady, his gaze clear as he paused at the door of the Archive, meeting Khan’s eyes across the busy street. Clearly he was not afraid to pay the price for his daughter’s life, though he’d wept with the agony of the choice Khan had given him. Not a true choice in the end, Khan supposed, thinking of the faces of his own children. But then, that was rather the point.

Khan watched silently as the man turned away and entered the Archive. Good. Now, all Khan need do was await the explosion, and his chance to secure his means of escape from this cursed planet.

He would not let himself think of the woman he’d left in the hotel room this morning. The way she’d looked as she’d lain there sleeping, her rich brown hair spread across the pillow. One small hand still outstretched, resting on the bed where he’d placed it, carefully, after plucking it from his bare chest. 

He’d never see her again, of course. Best he try to forget the feel of her skin, the sound of her voice calling his name---

“Khan,” he heard beside him, and his blood turned cold. He turned. 

Impossibly, she was here beside him, hands on hips, with accusation filling her great brown eyes. “What are you doing?” Molly asked, anguish in her tone. 

“You…you shouldn’t be here,” he bit out. How had she found him? 

“All your things, gone,” she said. “No message, for me, not a word. Why, Khan? After everything.” Tears were starting to flow down her cheeks. 

“You need to leave,” Khan told her, hating himself, but unable to ignore the hot panic rising into his throat. He, he was wearing protective clothing, he had a hood and mask to protect him from the worst of it, but Molly had nothing---

She would die. 

“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s going on,” she retorted, but then her wet eyes narrowed. “Khan,” she said slowly, a different note in her voice, “why are you wearing a fireproof coat?”

“Get out of here!” Khan roared, grabbing her shoulders and pushing her backward. “Now!” 

Passersby were stopping, frowning, and one man reached out a quelling hand. “Hey, friend, leave her be---“

But Molly waved the man off and stalked right back up to Khan, taking his arm in a firm grip. “I’m not leaving unless you drag me away. Now, Khan. What’s happening? Why are you so afraid…?” And despair dropped into his stomach as he watched Molly put it all together. 

“No,” she whispered, looking up into his face. “Something…something is going to happen here. Something bad. And you’re the reason.”

Khan said nothing. Molly’s mouth settled into a firm line. 

“Stop it happening, Khan,” she said. “I’m not leaving until you stop it. Now!”

An endless, agonized moment passed. And Khan swore, seized Molly’s hand, and pulled her across the street and through the doors of the Archive. 

***

Five minutes later, Molly stood by Thomas Harewood’s chair, her hands on his shaking shoulders, and watched as two burly Security officers placed an unresisting Khan in heavy handcuffs. Nearby, a nervous young technician was using tongs to place the signet ring and the glass of liquid carefully into separate shielded containers. 

Mr Harewood was nursing the beginnings of a radiation burn on the brown skin of the hand that had worn the ring. “You’ll need treatment for that. It will get worse,” Molly told him gently. He looked up at Molly and gave a short nod, his eyes red and haunted, and Molly felt anger clutch at her chest. 

She looked over at Khan and was shaken to find that he was already watching her, his face intense, unreadable. She flinched and dropped her eyes. 

_Is this who you really are, Khan?_ A terrorist, a would-be mass murderer? 

The man who’d made love to her so hungrily, then tried to hide his tears in her hair…who’d been wrenched into a hostile future at the hands of a Starfleet admiral, his only family held precariously hostage to control him. Imprisoned and used and finally poisoned when he’d dared try to escape. 

And the father of her child, though he didn’t know it. 

“Wait,” Molly said to the Security officer, still not looking at Khan. “I want to speak to whomever’s in charge. Before you haul him away. It’s not just…There’s a lot more to the story than just the b-bomb.” 

One of the Security officers turned, looked at her strangely. “You want to talk to the ranking officer?”

“Yes please.” Molly raised her chin. “The person Admiral Marcus reports to. It’s really important…the future of Starfleet is at stake,” she added. 

After a long moment, the officer turned away. “You’d better come with us. I’ll speak to my commander.”

“All right.” Molly heard Khan make a noise then, deep in his throat, but kept her eyes down. She was already too close to tears. 

More Security officers appeared, and Molly was escorted ahead of Khan’s detail as they marched him down a series of long, sloping corridors. They were deep underground, she knew from watching the screens back in the lift, and it seemed they had descended at least another level by the time they entered a dimly lit antechamber, with dusty display cases cluttered with what looked like Klingon artifacts. 

Molly was shown to a chair in front of a great desk. Sitting, she clasped her hands and struggled for control as Khan was stripped of his coat, roughly searched, and finally forced to his knees on the other side of the room. Daring to look at him, Molly was shocked to see that at some point Khan’s security had fitted a heavy metallic device over Khan’s nose and mouth, surely some sort of gag at the very least. Oh, cruel, and rather bizarre for a questioning situation---

“Good morning. You’re Doctor Hooper?” a hearty male voice said behind her; Molly turned to look. A gray, rangy man in a heavily decorated uniform had entered from the inner door and was walking behind the desk. 

“Um…yes. ‘Morning. You must be the Fleet Admiral,” Molly said shakily as he seated himself. Behind her, she heard a scuffle and a groan, but the man didn’t look away from Molly’s face. 

“Fleet Admiral Smith,” he told her, unsmiling. “Now, what did you need to tell me about this man? Please be as brief as you can.”

“Um.” Molly found herself shivering hard. “He, um. There are…ah…mitigating circumstances…”

“Out with it, young lady,” the man said, not unkindly. “You told Security that Starfleet’s future would hinge on your information?”

“Yes,” she replied, steadier now. “I have reason to believe that this man’s actions today were motivated by desperation. Which was, um, the result of grave misconduct…by one of your subordinate officers.” She forced herself to look the Fleet Admiral in the eyes. Oh, this was harder than she’d thought.

“You don’t say,” he replied. “What sort of misconduct?”

“Unlawful imprisonment, exploitation, assault, torture, to name a few.” Molly swallowed hard, feeling the weight of her words. “Blackmail, threat of harm to innocent parties, attempted murder…all in the service of purposely starting a war. So…high treason, I suppose.” Oh, god.

“And how did you find this out?” His eyes bored into hers. 

“He…he confided in me.” Molly dropped her gaze; she could feel herself blushing hard. 

“I’ll just bet,” the Fleet Admiral said. Startled, Molly looked up to see his lips curling in an ugly smile. 

Standing, the man addressed Khan’s security detail. “Sedate her, then take them both to the brig. And get that thing off his face.”

“Yes, Admiral Marcus,” was the last thing Molly heard before a cold pain hissed at her neck and she fell into darkness. 

**

Molly struggled up out of unconsciousness and into cold. Jerking awake, Molly opened bleary eyes onto a bright-white ceiling; she was lying on some sort of table, likely a medical exam unit by the feel of it. She couldn’t move her limbs. 

“Awake, I see,” she heard beside her; it was him, the Fleet Admiral. No. “Good. I’ve been ready to begin for a good half-hour, and my time is valuable. Isn’t it, Khan?” 

Molly turned her head and saw Admiral Marcus leaning against a bulkhead, his arms crossed, flanked by more Security officers. And nearby, in a narrow cell fronted by a wall of crystalline aluminum, stood Khan. 

He seemed unharmed, though paler than she’d ever seen him. They’d taken his civilian clothing and put him once more in the black bones of a commander’s uniform, a mockery. He stood as still as a reptile, his face empty of emotion, a blank. 

“I’m sorry, Khan,” she said softly, her heart aching as shame arose, burning her throat. But his eyes quickly narrowed at her, flashing a warning, and Molly gasped in dismay. Oh, she’d been so stupid, so naïve, and she’d just made yet another mistake…

“I’ll bet you’re sorry, young lady,” Marcus was saying. “Thank you for bringing him back to me, by the way. And for saving his life. That colloidal lead is great stuff, isn’t it? I’ll just tell them to double the dose when we replace his cuff.”

Molly said nothing. She looked at the ceiling. 

“Why’d you set out to blow up the Archive, Khan?” Marcus continued, turning. “Just revenge? But you couldn’t know I’d be here today. ” He sauntered over to Molly’s side and touched something on the surface she lay on. 

Burning pain spiked through Molly’s left arm. She screamed as it continued. When it finally stopped, it left behind a tingle in her fingers, a creeping numbness. 

“Nerve damage is hard to heal, Khan, if you’re not an Augment. But I’m sure you knew that,” she heard Marcus say. 

“I wanted information,” she heard Khan reply. “Your home address.”

“Not good enough, Khan. Do you think I’m an idiot?” The pain returned. Molly shrieked again, helplessly. 

“Oh, you might as well let her alone, Marcus,” Khan replied in a bored tone. “She was amusing, though finally just a means to an end. It’d be a shame if a talented pathologist were to lose the use of her hands, though.” 

“A means to an end. Interesting. And here I was just shown surveillance footage that strongly suggests that the reason you dashed into the Archive and stopped the bombing was simply that she asked you to.”

“Hardly. I realized Thomas Harewood had information I needed.”

Marcus just chuckled. “I’d cut her open, I’ll have you know, if it weren’t so messy. So just tell me, there’s a good boy.” Marcus leaned on the table next to her, and this time the agony slammed into Molly like a spike of hot iron. After half a second, nothing else existed but the anguish---

As from far away, she heard Khan shout and pound the glass. “Damn it, Marcus. Stop. Stop this!”

“Why?” she heard Marcus say as her pain went on and on.

“I---damn! I wanted the transwarp beaming device, the portable device!” 

“That’s more like it.” 

The worst of it eased, then, as Marcus stepped away from the table, but Molly could feel, now, that the pain was only farther up her arm. She no longer had any sensation in her hand, but for a sense of cold, of absence. 

Her left hand, gone. She began to weep. 

“Now,” Marcus said, rounding Molly’s table to stand by her right hand. “Where are the cryotubes?” He glanced sharply down at Molly as she gasped and looked over at Khan.

“I’m going to kill you, Marcus,” Khan snarled, hands clutching at the glass, his eyes red-rimmed. The Security guards were glancing at each other, and at the admiral. 

Marcus laughed. “First tell me where they are.” Horrific agony in her right arm, and Molly’s scream broke past her sobs. 

“In the body…s-storage facility,” she heard herself stammering. “Cold cases…under Barts…eighth basement.” She squeezed wet eyes closed. “I’m so sorry, Khan.”

“Verify that,” Marcus ordered one of the Security officers, who stepped away. A moment later, Marcus followed him.

Nothing happened for several minutes. Slowly, Molly forced herself to meet Khan’s gaze, and found him watching her with sad, hollow eyes. He gave her a slow nod of acknowledgement, his shoulders sagging in defeat.

He didn’t blame her, at least, for being unable to withstand her torture. Molly found some strength in that. 

“Thank you, Doctor Hooper,” the admiral said in her ear, too close. Molly flinched away. 

“We’ve secured your crew,” Marcus told Khan, “so now we can give you a choice, Khan.

“Time is getting short before my war gets started,” he continued. “The wheels are already turning. So I want you back in your workroom, Khan, to finish the work you started for me, and I need it done as fast as possible. Now, there are two ways we can do this, depending on how cooperative you feel.”

Bending over Molly, Marcus reached down and stroked her hair. She cringed away from his fingers.

“Option one. I hang the cryotubes up again, around your sleeping chamber. For each week you fail to complete your work, I’ll have one shot one down at random. As for Molly, I kill her right now.” 

Khan was silent, looking at Marcus with death in his eyes.

“Option two. We hang the cryotubes again, of course, but then we put your Molly in another clear chamber near yours, so you can watch each other at night. We’ll feed her, of course, but that’s all. She’ll stay sealed in the chamber until you’re finished.”

Khan turned his head to the side, ever so slightly. 

“Why,” he asked slowly, “would that scenario pressure me to work any faster?” 

Marcus grinned and looked at Molly. “Will you tell him, or should I?”


	7. Chapter 7

“Will you tell him, or should I?” 

Marcus’s words hung in the air behind the clear front of Khan’s cell. One look at Molly’s face, white with pain and fear, and the truth bloomed silently in his mind. 

First, Khan cursed himself for a fool. An instant later, he came to a decision. 

Khan stepped toward the wall of his cell and hooked the fingers of both hands around a corner of the plas-steel housing. Bracing one boot against the wall, he tore away the section and plunged an arm deep into the gaping hole. 

Outside his cell, Marcus was shouting into a comm, calling for more Security officers. Good. The admiral might have found a phaser, hit Khan with a kill shot---a calculated risk, but necessary in light of this threat to Molly---but it seemed Marcus had panicked instead. Khan’s fingers were at work deep in the wall, tearing away cables and rerouting the controls of his cell’s door. His muscles jolted as he tugged a live wire into place.

There, he had it. The transparent panel shuddered, then retracted. By now, more Security officers were pounding in, and Marcus himself was fleeing, the coward. Khan shoved the door aside, dropping the first man with a swift chop to the throat. 

The rest was over quickly, hardly worth the precious seconds it took. Eight men lay crumpled on the floor, and Khan turned to Molly and released her from her restraints.

“My hands,” Molly whispered. Eyes wide and wet, she raised the numb, useless members, the fingers curled and flopping back, the palms turned upward almost in a gesture of supplication.

There was little he could say to her now. Silently, Khan scooped Molly up and bore her out of the room. 

For a wonder, the corridor was deserted. Khan kicked open the hatchway to the emergency stairwell and hurried downward. He could not hope to fight his way alone to the surface from so far underground, not with Molly to protect. Their only chance of escape lay below.

Molly was stirring as Khan paused to check for pursuit. “Put me down. I can walk,” she was murmuring, flapping a lifeless hand against his chest. Khan gritted his teeth and resumed his headlong descent. 

“I’ll put you down in a moment, when we reach our destination,” he told her. “Judging by the lack of resistance here, I suspect I’ll have to.” 

When they reached the final corner, Khan set Molly on her feet. She stood, shakily, her useless hands curled close, as Khan peered around the corner. Sure enough, twenty armed Security officers guarded the crucial hatchway. Khan cursed. He’d revealed his goal to Marcus to stop Molly’s pain, and though he could not regret that, now it would cost him more time…

He whispered to Molly, pressing her back against the bulkhead.

“Stay here until I call. No matter what happens.”

She nodded, wobbling on her feet but looking back at him steadily. Khan gave her a nod in return, and raced around the corner, right at the guards. 

He got most of the way there before the first stun-shot hit him. He dropped like a stone and lay where he fell, unmoving, as the men pressed in to surround him. Credulous fools.

They were bending over him with handcuffs when he exploded into action, lashing out with fists and elbows and boots and skull. The men scattered, of course, but by that time Khan had snatched a phaser, and their distance from him no longer mattered. 

“Molly,” he called, hoarsely, when it was over. 

As Molly appeared and moved toward him, Khan turned and keyed open the hatchway, swallowing a groan. He’d taken several more phaser blasts to the torso before his opponents realized that stun-shots were ineffective, but they still left an ache in his ribs. 

“Khan, what are we doing?” Molly demanded as he sealed the hatchway behind them. “I’ve been trusting you, god knows why except I’ve no one else to trust here, but how are we going to get out? The whole place is coming for us---listen, there’s more of them---“

“No time for conversation,” he said tersely. He opened a storage compartment and pulled out the large, bullet-shaped device. He powered it on, ignoring the shouts outside, and keyed in coordinates. “Come here, Molly.”

“Why?” she asked, fear in her great brown eyes. “What---“

“No. Just come here!”

Khan set the device down, then pulled Molly against his body, hard. She struggled, but they were already cocooned by spinning particles of golden energy. 

***

The two of them rematerialized on a dingy white deck, barely visible in the dimness, and the air that filled Molly’s lungs was cold and stale. She pushed Khan away with her forearms, trying to ignore the ache in her useless hands, and he released her. 

“What have you done, Khan?” she cried, stumbling against a bulkhead and falling to her knees, unable to catch herself. “Where have you taken…us…?” 

Molly gasped as she caught sight of the wide window over Khan’s shoulder. Stars, endless stars in a profound blackness, and sliding smoothly into view, the immense dun-colored curve of a planet…

“We are on the _Botany Bay_ ,” Khan replied. He bent to examine a portable transporter pad that was clearly not part of the original vessel. “This is the sleeper ship my comrades and I were stolen from. It’s been decommissioned and placed in the orbit of Saturn.”

Molly stared up at him, her mind blank but for one thought. How was this possible? No transporter could have taken them so far… 

“We used my transwarp beaming device,” Khan said, pressing buttons on an antique interface. “I designed it around a new equation. Unfortunately I was not allowed to add a self-destruct feature, nor could it take the two of us nearly as far as I could have gone alone. Molly, get onto the transporter pad.”

Molly swallowed thickly, huddling against the solidity of the bulkhead. “Khan, I---“ 

“Let me make this perfectly clear,” he said coldly. “We left my device behind, so they know where we went. They are coming for us.” Khan turned to look at her, implacable. “I will never allow you to fall into their hands. Come here, now.”

Molly began to weep, torn between dread of Marcus and fear of her lover. But Khan, at least, seemed to care whether she lived or died. She struggled to her feet, unable to wipe away the tears that blinded her, and moved toward him as best she could. 

But Khan was gentle this time as he gathered her against him. He reached over to slap a final button. “Energize.”

***

This time, when the two of them rematerialized, it was in a dim, drab room filled with the howl of wind from outside. A moon of Saturn, then? 

“We’re on Titan.” Khan stepped away from her. “A research outpost, abandoned for the storm season. I set the _Botany Bay_ to self-destruct after we left, so we should be safe here for a time.”

He shouldered open the disused door and crossed a room filled with dusty workstations. A high, narrow window spilled cool light, though it showed Molly nothing but scouring, grayish snow.

Khan was rummaging in a drawer marked “Medical,” and by the time Molly emerged, sniffling, he had pulled out a fluid transfer unit. 

“Molly, come here.” Sitting at a worktable, he rolled up a sleeve and pressed the tip of the device to his skin. The reservoir filled with dark blood.

Molly didn’t move. She curled her numb hands against her chest and shivered, looking at Khan across the dim space. “What’s that for?”

“My cells can heal your hands,” he said, not looking at her.

“Really?” Apprehensive but wanting terribly to believe him, Molly moved to sit.

Khan did not reply. He placed the device against Molly’s arm and pressed the injector. 

A thousand questions flooded her medical mind, but asking him would mean meeting his eyes. So Molly said nothing, and looked up at the window. After a time, her fingers began to twitch of their own accord, and she felt tiny sparks of pain, so sweet, shooting through the flesh that had been numb. 

She looked over at Khan where he sat waiting. Molly broke the oppressive silence.

“It’s working.”

“Good.”

“We need to talk.” Molly swallowed.

“Yes.” His face was stone. 

“You used me, Khan.” Her pulse jumped with something akin to terror. “I saw your situation, and I wanted to help you. And after I did, you left me behind. To bomb the Archive.”

His ice-blue eyes flicked to her, and away. “I could ask no more of you than you’d given. It was time for me to leave.” 

“And you knew I’d try to stop you.”

“That is also true.” He looked at the floor. 

“I still can’t believe it, Khan. You were going to kill all those people…”

“You knew who I was, Molly.” Khan got up, began to pace with clenched fists. “That first night in the workroom, you recognized my name, knew who I’d been centuries ago.”

“You ruled a quarter of the planet.” Oh, she could believe it. “But you were a leader. Not a terrorist.” 

“Many would disagree. But now, I’m only a beast.” Khan gave a laugh that set Molly’s teeth on edge. “A curiosity, last of an extinct breed. Backed into the corner of my cage.”

“Self-pity doesn’t suit you, Khan,” Molly snapped, fury kindling in her chest. “Thanks to you, I’m in that cage too. What did you expect me to do after you’d blown up the Archive and fled the planet? Was I supposed to run to Starfleet, tell them you’d forced me to help you, so I wouldn’t be branded a traitor?” 

Khan stopped pacing and faced her. “And why not? Eventually you’d be able to resume your life.”

“With a murderer’s child in my belly.” Molly spoke flatly.

Khan closed his eyes. 

A long moment passed before he said, “How long have you known?”

“Since the day we moved the cryotubes.” 

“Ten days ago.” Khan frowned. “Molly. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Would you have done anything differently if I had?” Molly couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice.

“I---damn it, Molly.” Khan ran agitated fingers through his hair. “But would you have ever actually borne this child?”

“Before this morning, you mean? Yes. I might have done. I thought…” Molly choked down a sob. _I thought I loved you._

Khan turned away, folded his arms. Molly could see the muscles in his jaw working. Finally, he spoke to the wall. 

“Molly. Aside from anything else, I must…I must tell you, it’s dangerous for a normal human woman to bear an Augment’s child. They grow big, and grow quickly, and demand much. Without proper care, many women have died. You would have died if you had gone into Marcus’s cell. And he knew it.”

Molly sat very still, listening to the storm winds’ muted howl. 

“That’s why you broke out of the brig,” she whispered. “To protect me.” She flexed her tingling hands, took a shuddering breath.

“You think I’m a monster. You think my child would be, too. But Marcus is the true monster, Molly! He has an Augment’s drive to rule without an Augment’s intellect, and you’ve seen only the smallest part of what he’s capable of.”

“But still, you were planning to kill people,” Molly cried. “No matter what you say, you can’t---“

“Marcus will kill _my_ people. After he’s finished with us all, with the two of us. How else could his game end?” Khan struck a fist against the bulkhead, leaving a dent behind. Molly flinched, then set her jaw.

“We have to go to Starfleet,” she said, her heart racing now. “Tell them the truth.”

“Ah, yes. That strategy worked so very well when you tried it earlier today.”

Molly couldn’t help it. She drew back and slapped Khan across his beautiful, sneering face.

When he didn’t react, when he just stood there, glowering silently in his maddening way, she struck him again. And again---but Khan caught her wrist, tugged her close, and neatly tucked her arm behind her back. 

“Glad to see your hands have healed, Molly,” he drawled down at her. “Though what you just did with them does rather tarnish your righteous halo.” 

With a cry of rage, Molly snatched at his hair with her free hand, yanked his head forward, and seized his mouth in a feverish kiss.

Khan snarled against her lips, forcing them open for his tongue. Still prisoning her arm behind her, he reached down to clutch her bottom, digging his hard fingertips into her flesh and laughing deep in his chest at her muffled shriek of outrage.

Molly broke away from the kiss, panting. “Damn you, Khan. Damn you…” She released his hair with a jerk and scratched her nails down his neck. 

That drew a groan from him where her slaps had not, and Molly smirked in as Khan bent to take her mouth once more. When he thrust his body against hers, Molly felt his hard cock pushing insistently against her belly. 

“Do you think you can hurt me, little Molly?” he whispered against her cheek, his voice sending frissons racing down her back. “You cannot. I promise you.”

“No?” Molly ran her hand down that delicious arse of his and insinuated a leg between his thighs. “Not even if I do---this?” She punched her knee upward, stopping a bare instant before making contact.

Khan flinched and spat a curse, and Molly snickered. With a low roar, he shoved her back against the wall. Rucking up her skirt, he slid cold fingers past her knickers and right into the liquid heat of her pussy. 

Molly yelped and grabbed at his wrist. Khan smiled in satisfaction. “So wet already, filthy thing,” he rumbled in her ear, crowding her against the wall with his body. Cruelly, he ground the pad of his thumb against her clit. “Tell me to stop.”

“Don’t you dare stop, you bastard.” Molly gritted her teeth, determined to endure this harsh pleasure even as the pressure on her clit made her writhe. 

In retaliation she plucked open his trousers, slipped her hand inside. When her fingers closed around the hot, silken length of him, Khan hissed. 

“Two can play at this game,” Molly purred, feeling him throb under her sliding grasp. “How long can you last if I do---this?” She moved her thumb, just so.

“Oh…oh, damn it, Molly.” Panting, Khan pulled his hand from her pussy so he could break her grip. Tearing the seam of her knickers, Khan cradled her arse to hoist her against the wall. Pressing forward, he dragged the head of his cock over her bare pussy, far too slowly, making her squirm and sigh. 

“Khan, stop teasing…Just fuck me.” And Molly cried out as he obliged her, filling her so breathlessly full, full of him.

Winding her arms around his broad back, she bared her throat to his kisses. His chin rasped against her softness, leaving her red and glowing. Even as he thrust up into her, she felt his teeth catch in her skin, a sharp pinch that deepened slowly into a delicious burn. Her eyes slipped closed to savor the way the heat of it slithered down her spine. 

“Marking your territory, Khan?” she murmured, but heard only a deep chuckle in response. 

Abruptly, Khan shifted his grip on her arse so he could slide one hand between their bodies. Molly trembled in apprehension as smooth fingertips rolled against her clit. 

“I know you too well now, Molly Hooper.” Wicked fingers, punishing fullness…a mounting urgency in her body as she clung to him like a drowning woman. “In these moments, you can’t hope to resist me. You’ve never even wished to. So just give in to me. Yes, good girl. Give me what I’m due.” 

His words were like the whisper of a blade at her neck, and Molly gasped, surrendered, and with a low moan began to come. Khan caught her chin with his wet fingers, making her look up into his intent face, at those predator’s eyes narrowed in triumph as he pulsed his own climax into her belly. 

“I always win, Molly,” he said softly against her forehead, holding her in place as she shivered with her release. “You’ve learned by now…I always win.”

But he kissed her hungrily afterward, drawing her down to the floor just as he had that first night, cradling her face against his shoulder. And Molly clung to him as they rested, saying nothing, just looking across the room to the window and the swirling snow, and thinking. 

***

The cold light had dimmed into twilight by the time Molly and Khan began cataloguing the resources at the science station. They worked quietly, saying little to each other, their unspoken, uneasy truce hanging heavy in the air.

Finally, Khan stamped in from investigating the last outbuilding, his breath smoking, skin red with cold. He sealed the hatchway and faced Molly at the dining table, where she sat looking over the medical supplies.

“More rations, uninspiring but adequate, that could last us another month at least,” Khan said, ticking off his discoveries on his fingers. “More science equipment, nothing out of the ordinary. A basic replicator---needs repair. Five insulated pressure suits. One extra-enclosure vehicle, with spare fuel cells. How are the medical supplies?”

“Minimal. Only one tricorder, and it’s broken.” Molly gave a sigh, packing the last of the supplies back into the storage unit.

“With luck, we won’t need it.”

“What do you suggest we do?” Molly frowned at him as she got up from the dining table, clutching her stomach. She’d had to dash to the head to vomit after smelling the rations they’d heated up earlier. Her pregnancy, it seemed, was making its presence known. 

“We wait here,” Khan decreed. “Long enough for Marcus’s search to be called off. There are ten thousand places we could have gone within transporter range of the _Botany Bay_ , and he can’t search them all if he wants to keep us a secret. And the electrical blizzards of Titan’s pole will scramble life readings. We should be safe here.” 

“And if they do find us?” 

“Then I’ll think of something.” Khan made an impatient gesture. “At any rate, after several weeks we’ll take the EEV and the protective gear, and strike out for the nearest settlement. Then we’ll make our way to a spaceport, get off Titan however we can. From there---I’ll find a way to recover my people.”

“You want to leave the station, take out the EEV…through this?” Molly bent her head toward the methane snow that scoured the window’s thick glass. 

Khan sat at a science station, idly trailing long fingers over the display. “We cannot afford to wait until the end of the storm season. You have your own timeline, Molly,” he said, his face grim. “You’ll need proper care before things…progress.”

“Yes,” she said shortly, looking at the floor. “That’s true. But Khan, there’s still the other way. It would resolve everything much faster, bring Marcus to court-martial, free your people, maybe even you. We can still appeal to Starfleet…”

“Molly.” His voice held a rising note of warning. 

“Not everyone in Starfleet brass can be a warmonger,” Molly said, nettled. “I know someone. A young captain. He’s a brash sort, but he and I…well, I trust him.” Molly turned aside, trying to hide her blush. “And he’s known Admiral Pike for years. I could contact him, use a secure channel. He’d know what to do.”

“No.” His voice was flat.

“Khan---“

“We maintain a comm blackout. There will be no transmissions. We can’t risk leading Marcus to us.” 

“We’re at risk no matter what, Khan. But even if we do succeed in getting off Titan, what am I meant to do then?” Molly asked, her mouth tight. “Flee the system with you, remain a fugitive?”

“Once our trail is cold and I have secured a starship, I can drop you wherever you like.” Khan laced his fingers together and looked up at the window. “Any outpost you choose. You can tell them the same story: that I forced you to help me. Just add ‘hostage-taking’ to my list of crimes.” His mouth twisted, and he turned away. 

After a long moment, he spoke again, an odd catch in his voice. “When that time comes, I would appreciate it if you did not mention that the child is mine. I…don’t wish to be thought of as more of a monster than I already am.”

Staring at Khan’s back, Molly was silent. She hated the way he made her feel. 

***

That night, as Khan lay wrapped in his heavy sleep, Molly slipped out of her own bed and left the bunkroom. Stealing on silent feet past the research stations, she glanced behind her once, then powered on the communications panel. She opened a secure channel, then began to speak. 

“Private message for James T. Kirk.”


	8. Chapter 8

Molly was almost asleep in the chair in front of the communications panel, her head pillowed on her arms in the dimness of the main room, when the glow of the screen washed over her. She raised her head, blinking, to read the display.

_Incoming communication from James T. Kirk, First Officer. Starfleet Headquarters, San Francisco._

“Open the channel,” she murmured, shaking herself awake. 

“Molly Hooper! Is that you? It’s been ages, babe.” Jim’s flirtatious smile hadn’t changed, but his usually playful blue eyes were wide and worried. “Got your message. What a story!” 

“Hi, Jim. Yeah. Hard to believe, right?” She stroked her hair and pulled it over one shoulder, a little self-conscious now; he was wearing his formal uniform for some reason, with not a blond hair out of place, and she must look a fright.

“Well, there are only two people I’d believe if they came to me with this kinda stuff, and the other one’s half a Vulcan.” Jim’s mouth quirked up. “So you’re actually on Titan with this really old guy? Who rescued you, but also sort of kidnapped you?”

“Yeah,” she said, glancing behind her at the bunkroom door. “Shush…He’s asleep, I hope. And he’s not old. Well, he doesn’t look it.” 

“I see.” A twinkle of amusement before Kirk mastered himself. “No, I’m sorry. Seriously, Molly, do you need me to come and punch him out for you?” 

“Don’t try that, Jim,” Molly said hastily, alarmed to see him puffing up like a rooster. “I mean it. He beat up thirty men by himself to break us out of the Archive.” 

“Good god.” Jim looked down, thinking. “And this is the guy you say Admiral Marcus used to build a secret war machine against the Klingon Empire? Pretty serious accusation.”

“There’s proof.” Molly glanced behind her again. “Marcus made him design specialized weapons…and a monster starship. Still in spacedock, orbit of Io.”

“Good, ‘cause Admiral Pike will need something really solid before he can move on this.” Jim’s face grew ironic. “I’d just do it on my own authority, but…I’m not a captain anymore. Long story.”

“Oh,” was all she said. She’d noticed the change in rank when his call came in. Too bad, but knowing Jim, it’d be a good story. 

“Even so, I’m not going to mess around, Molls,” he was saying. “I have a guy I’ll send out to Io today, and I’ll bring the evidence straight to Pike. I’m hoping he’ll authorize me to come out and get you by tomorrow morning, put you both in protective custody.”

“Tomorrow? Oh, Jim.” _So soon…_

“Is that okay? He’s not, like, hurting you or anything, is he?” Jim’s eyes grew dark. 

“No, it’s fine. He hasn’t, um, harmed me.” Molly paused, hoping her confusion didn’t show. “He’s really dangerous, though, and incredibly smart. It’s going to take a lot to bring him into custody.”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, a phaser set to Stun doesn’t work at all, even multiple shots. And he broke out of the brig at the Archive in about two minutes. Tore up the wall and hacked the door lock.”

“Holy shit. Who is this guy, Molly?”

“Someone you should never underestimate. And I don’t want to tell you all the details now, but you ought to know that he has every reason to hate Starfleet. I’m hoping we can convince him otherwise, but for now, just assume he won’t…come quietly. Or even if he does, don’t assume he’s contained. Ever.”

“We’ll have the Klingon cuffs ready, then.” Jim’s boyish face was grim. “Okay. Hold tight, babe. We’re going to go after that evidence and get you home real soon.”

“Thanks, Jim. Thank you so much.” Molly’s eyes stung as she closed the channel. 

***

Khan blinked abruptly awake, barely able to see the curtain of his sleeping alcove in the dimness of Titan’s long night. The station was programmed to a twenty-four-hour cycle, and the lights were still out in the bunkroom; it was not yet time to awaken. What had roused him? The moan of the storm winds? Or…

Hearing the whisper of small bare feet, he peered out past his curtain. There was Molly, her face indistinct in the gloom, padding past him back to her own alcove. Surely she’d had to be sick again. Khan’s brow furrowed in worry. 

“Molly,” he whispered to her back, feeling almost guilty asking for her attention. “Are you all right?” 

She paused for a long moment, then turned back to him; he couldn’t make out her expression in the near-darkness. She reached out, tentatively, and Khan slipped from his alcove so he could touch her slender fingers. 

Molly drew him close and, to his astonishment, wound her arms around his back and pressed her cheek to his chest. She was trembling…weeping, leaving hot tears on his skin. Khan allowed himself to settle his hands on her shoulders, carefully, lest she protest.

She soon moved away, leaving him standing alone, but turned back as if by impulse and caught his hand. Wiping her face quickly, she towed him toward her own alcove. She threw herself into it and would have pulled him atop her, but Khan stopped her gently, guiding her instead to sit on the edge of her mattress. Kneeling down before her, he lifted her brief nightgown, brushed her legs apart. 

At the first touch of his mouth on her center, Molly moaned above him, the sound high and sad under the ever-present howl of the wind. Warm little fingers combed through his hair as he penetrated her with his tongue, savored her taste, kissed her sweet little clit. Perhaps he ought to press her back onto the bed, ought to devour her and make her come shrieking, but here in the black emptiness of this night, he could not bring himself to do it. 

When Molly came, she was silent, her face turned away from him. Khan waited on his knees, half-expecting to be sent back to his own alcove. But Molly’s touch whispered against his cheek, her thumb tracing a soft line over his brow. 

“Please,” he heard, her words barely audible above the storm. She lay back on her narrow mattress, her arms open, entreating. Releasing a breath, he crawled to her, hardly believing it when she guided him inside the warmth of her body. 

For an endless time they rocked together, locked in a slow rhythm, her arms cradling him close. Khan bent his forehead to hers, sharing her breath, his hands winding in the wealth of her outspread hair. 

Under him, Molly seemed lost in a dream, riding him like a wave but not reaching after another peak. She was so lovely, so soft, so rare, this slip of a woman who even now bore his child inside her, a child who would never be born, that he should never have inflicted on her. She was wise; she would end her misfortune at her first chance, surely, and she would leave him when he brought her to an outpost, make her way back home. But until then---until then---

He could let himself pretend she was his, just for this moment. And he could let himself be hers, even if she never knew it. Until then. 

“May I?” he whispered, nearly undone, unable to wait for her any longer. And she drew him close, heartbreakingly close, and let him spill himself inside her yet again. 

She even let him stay, afterward. And Khan held her, wakeful in the darkness as she slept, too lonely now even to weep. 

***

The change in Molly was still apparent the next morning. She didn’t even try to eat any breakfast, nor busy herself with small tasks as she had done during his recovery in the hotel room. Instead she sat bolt upright at the dining table, clutching an untasted mug of tea between still hands, almost vibrating with anxiety. She sat there for hours, and though Khan sensed her gaze chasing him as he moved around the room, she carefully avoided meeting his eyes.

“Molly. You need to eat something,” he said finally, after the morning had worn entirely away. He stood up over the replicator he’d been repairing and laid his tools aside. 

“No point,” Molly said, her voice tight. “I’d just throw it up.”

Khan opened his mouth to retort, but the main screen flickered on, startling both of them. A terse computerized voice announced, “Emergency message, priority one.”

“Onscreen,” they said together. The display flickered and resolved into the image of a blond man piloting a small craft, frantic, glancing at the screen every few seconds. 

“You have to leave the station! Now!” His eyes were wild. “Marcus is coming!”

“What? Who are you?” Khan demanded, fists clenched. He wished he could seize the other man and make him talk.

“Jim Kirk, Molly’s old friend---”

“You contacted Starfleet,” he said to Molly, flatly, but Kirk was still talking. 

“Yeah, she did. So we’ve been monitoring Marcus. And he just up and left the secret Io spacedock in a hurry, after ordering a bunch of torpedoes loaded onto that monster ship of his. His flight plan said Mars Habitat 5, but he’s closing in on Titan right this second!”

“How---how many torpedoes?” Khan shouted, his heart going black. 

“Dunno. Seventy-something. A lot.”

For a long moment, Khan couldn’t think at all as terror clawed at his soul. Then he asked, “How much time?”

“Ten minutes, tops. And something’s telling me he’s not gonna negotiate. Khan---get her out of there!”

Khan looked at Molly, who was shrinking in on herself. “I will. You’re on your way?” 

“Yeah, but I’m thirty minutes out. Damn it.” Kirk glared down at his instruments. 

“Your sensors won’t be able to find our vehicle in the polar interference,” Khan told him. “We’ll make for the nearest settlement. TFS1399.”

“Hurry. Kirk out.”

***

As the screen went dark, Khan rounded on Molly, who flinched. But instead of accusing her of betrayal, he barked orders. 

“Get to the south outbuilding and put on an insulated suit. Then load all the spare fuel cells into the EEV and open the outer doors.”

“What about you, Khan?” Molly gasped, scrambling to her feet.

Incredibly, he seemed to hesitate, glancing between her and the display screen. “I’m going to see if I can appease Marcus.”

“No, Khan! You heard Kirk---we need to leave!” Fear prickled through her at the haunted look on his face. 

“He has my family in those torpedoes. I have to try.” His hands moved over the display. 

Molly stood still a second more, failing to think of anything to say, then whirled and ran for the hatchway to the outbuilding. 

Shockingly frigid air hit Molly as she cracked open the hatchway. Holding her breath against the cold, she crossed the dim hangar to the niche where the insulated suits were kept. She powered on the smallest one and gripped the straps to climb inside. Her fingers fumbled to find the closure---it had been too long since her training at the Academy---but soon the suit sealed itself and heat circulated to her limbs. She sighed in relief, then powered on one of the larger suits as well, so it could warm. 

Waddling inside the rustle of the suit, Molly made for the EEV in front of the inner doors. She bit her lip as she saw that the EEV was little more than a four-wheeled rover with a roll bar, far from the cozy vehicle she’d hoped for. But then, the station scientists would never contemplate striking out into a blizzard of methane snow. 

She spied the spare power cells in a compartment beside the EEV. She shuffled over, grabbed a handle, and pulled, but gave a squeak of dismay when the cylinder didn’t even wobble. She tried again with both hands, but it was no use. Even one power cell was far too heavy for her. 

“Khan,” Molly moaned inside the suit’s visor. Ridiculous---he couldn’t hear. Turning, Molly shambled back to the hatchway.

When she regained the corridor and opened her visor, she heard shouting. Panic clutched at her chest as she crept closer to the main room and heard Khan’s voice, ragged, pleading.

“---I’ll do anything, anything you want. Please!” 

“Your usefulness has ended, Khan,” Marcus replied from the screen, his lined face grim. “You’re far too dangerous to leave alive, you and the rest of those megalomaniacs you call friends.”

Khan clutched at his hair. “But Molly. Molly is not an Augment, Marcus! At least beam her up before you---“

“She knows far too much. And I can’t let that kid of yours be born. I’m sorry, Khan, it really is a shame to waste you all. Once I get here, I’ll make it quick. Marcus out.”

The screen went dim, but Khan didn’t move, even when Molly ran forward and pulled his hand. “Leave, Molly,” he said to the blank screen, his voice empty. “Before he arrives. Go.” He pressed her back toward the hatchway.

She pulled at his arm, desperate now, seeing despair growing like a cancer behind his icy eyes. “I can’t---I can’t lift the power cells. I need your help---I need you with me. Please!” 

He looked down at her, set his jaw, and passed her to stride down the hall into the outbuilding. 

“Open the outer doors, Molly,” he ordered her absently as he loaded the power cells into the back of the EEV. 

“Not until you get a suit on.” Molly faced him, trying as hard as she could to look resolute as precious seconds ticked past. “I’m not leaving without you. That’s final.”

With a sigh as of exhaustion, Khan obeyed her, pulling on his own suit and striding back to the EEV. Molly shuffled her way into the driver’s side and ratcheted up the seat to proper height. Then she sealed her visor and slapped the button to open the doors. 

In an instant, the polar blizzard blasted into the outbuilding, surrounding the EEV and drowning out Molly’s shriek. She felt Khan’s weight as he vaulted into the passenger seat, his hands as he reached over to fasten her lap belt for her. Molly was already pressing hard on the forward pedal. 

It was a good thing he’d belted her in, because as soon as they trundled out of the station, Titan’s low gravity took over and she would have bounced out of her seat right away. Her heart pounding almost loud enough to drown out the storm, Molly drove forward as fast as she dared, straight into the rushing snow, striving above all else for _distance_ from the doomed station.

A slope was rising smoothly before them. She couldn’t see to left or right to avoid the hill, so she pushed the EEV’s engine onward---upward---

Abruptly, they broke out of the worst of the blizzard, and Molly gasped aloud to see Saturn and its rings overhead, their beige-gray splendor commanding almost half the night sky. But she could spare no attention for the majestic vista after catching sight of the tiny black outline that crawled across the face of Saturn like an insect, swarming closer every second.

“The _Vengeance._ ” Khan’s voice crackled in her ear as he twisted around to look. “Marcus. Keep driving, Molly. Follow the top of the ridge.” 

Molly pushed forward, fighting her terror as the starship buzzed nearer and nearer, its ghastly hugeness growing apparent as it lowered through the atmosphere to hang above them, blotting out the sky. 

A light sparked from its underside and streaked with impossible speed to explode on the ground several kilometers away, and Molly cried out and swerved to one side as Khan’s howl of grief ripped through her skull. The sound wave hit them just as several more sparks flared out from the torpedo bays of the _Vengeance_ and burst on the surface.

“He’s killing them. Molly. They’re dying.” Khan braced against the dash, hunched in anguish, as Molly fought to get the EEV on top of the ridge again. Five more sparks, five more streaks of fire and the following sharp reports, but the intervals between explosion and sound wave were growing shorter…

“They’re getting closer,” Molly gasped into her microphone, struggling to control the jouncing vehicle. Above them, the _Vengeance_ rained its fire down steadily, and dozens of fireballs bloomed in a pattern that curved toward their trajectory. “Oh god, Khan, he hit the station…”

“Seventy-two torpedoes,” Khan croaked. “He knows we must have fled. He’ll strafe every inch of ground…I have to do it before he hits us, Molly, no choice, I have to---“

“Do what, Khan?” she called over his shouts.

Khan grabbed at the EEV’s comm unit and plugged the hardwire connection into his suit, then stood and faced the ship, bracing himself on the roll bar. “Broadcast all frequencies,” he barked. “Marcus! Stop it now! Spare those who remain, or I swear on my maker’s grave that I will end you!”

The admiral’s voice crackled back, even as a fresh volley of torpedoes screamed their way down. “You won’t live to threaten me again---I’m gonna incinerate every inch of rock within ten clicks of here. Game over, Khan---”

“Wrong,” Khan snarled over the connection. “It ends here. _Sema Antonio Anna-Maria Pietr David._ You can die with them, and damn you to hell!”

He craned his head upward to the hulking starship, and Molly followed his gaze, only to cry out in shock as she saw primal fire blossoming out from the heart of its great disc. As she watched, the inferno swelled, burgeoned, and exploded outward, silent beyond the haze of atmosphere. Great chunks of debris left smoking trails as the broken bulk of the ship began its great, slow fall toward the horizon.

Khan sagged bonelessly back into his seat. “Self-destruct?” Molly gasped, her hands shaking on the controls as their vehicle headed down the end of the ridge.

“Programmed in secret,” Khan replied hollowly. “Just in case…”

“The trigger code---those names----your friends in the cryotubes?” she asked, then wished she hadn’t.

“No,” Khan said shortly. “My children, centuries ago. Keep driving, Molly.”

And Khan sank into a chasm of silence, his eyes fixed on nothingness, as Molly drove them both back into the whirling whiteness of the blizzard, the cold in her heart owing little to the methane snow.


	9. Chapter 9

A great rumble arose all around the EEV as Khan and Molly fled south through the methane blizzard. It was good Molly was driving, Khan thought dully, watching his breath fog his suit’s visor and evaporate away, over and over and over. There was nothing left in him, nothing for him but the cycling litany of _I failed, they’re gone, I’ll never see them again._

“That roaring…The _Vengeance_ must have hit the ground,” Molly ventured, her voice crackling softly into his speaker through the polar interference. Khan said nothing. He turned his face away.

At some point Molly must have programmed the coordinates of the terraforming settlement into the EEV’s bare-bones navigation system. A green beacon shone out from the vehicle’s small screen for Molly to follow through the trackless snow. For an uncountable time, they followed that beacon in silence. 

_I failed, they’re gone, I’ll never see them again. I failed, they’re gone---_

“I’m getting cold,” he heard Molly say softly. He roused himself to look at her. Sure enough, the power indicator on her heated suit was low. His was too, but he hadn’t noticed the creeping chill. 

He cleared his throat. “I’ll hook up a spare power cell to your suit. Hold on a moment, Molly.” Khan turned and reached behind his seat to grab one of the cylinders. 

They weren’t there. The rear of the EEV was empty. 

Khan turned back, sat in his seat. He watched Molly for a few seconds as she continued to follow the beacon. Glancing at the screen, he read the remaining distance to the settlement. Read it again, to be sure.

“Khan?” 

Molly was looking at him now, concerned. He had to tell her. 

“Molly,” he said, despair making his voice flat. “The power cells must have fallen out before, when we slipped off the ridge and bounced. There aren’t any more back there.”

“No power cells?” Molly braked the EEV hard, turned to him as it jounced to a stop. “You’re telling me---“

“We don’t have enough to power our suits and the EEV for long enough to reach the settlement.” 

Molly was still, visibly fighting for control. “Okay,” she said after a minute. “What can we do? Go back and find them?”

“We wouldn’t make it all the way back and then get to the settlement on those cells, even if we could find them in this blizzard, which is vanishingly unlikely.”

“Well, we’ve come about halfway already. Can we walk the rest of the way, and share the EEV’s cell?”

Khan found himself admiring her pluck. But, no. “Impossible,” he told her. “It would take far longer to walk there than the cell could heat our suits.”

“Route everything to the EEV and run for it, try to bear the cold?”

“It’s negative two hundred Celsius out here. No.”

“What if---“

“Molly. Here is what’s going to happen. The EEV might be able to make it there on what’s left, and power one suit on its lowest setting. You’ll become very cold, but if you keep moving, you might survive. I’m staying here.”

“No.” Molly looked at him with steel in her eyes. “Together, or not at all.” 

But Khan was already climbing out of the vehicle, wading into the drifts of methane snow. With one last look at her face in the soft light of her suit’s hood, he strode as quickly as he could away from the EEV, into the blizzard. 

“Khan--!” Her cry wrung his heart, but he kept moving, embracing the blinding whiteness and its promise of serene oblivion, of sinking into his final sleep, following his family down. If only there were a place beyond death, he thought sadly. If they could, they would have waited for him there.

“Stay in the EEV, Molly,” he said into his headset. 

“You---you can’t---please!” Molly’s voice crackled with interference from even this short separation. 

“Molly. Listen to me. Follow the beacon, and don’t stop. You’ll get there.” He paused, then continued, resolute. “I have to do this, because I love you, Molly. More than my life. I want you to know that.” 

Khan reached up then, and switched off the connection.

***

“Khan,” Molly whispered, her fingers already growing stiff with cold around the controls of the EEV. “Don’t leave us…”

She’d heard the connection go dead, and knew that if she left the EEV to follow him into that freezing dark, her life would end out there, beyond any doubt. She had to choose, right now.

She exhaled slowly, laid a hand on her belly. “Just you and me now,” she whispered. “Let’s make a last run for it, then, little one.” She bent the controls to move the EEV forward, keeping the beacon in the center of the screen, striving to forget that, every second, she was moving farther away from him. 

Molly could never say, afterward, how long she pushed on through the storm, following the green glow of the beacon. Fearing every moment to feel the engine die, or lose a wheel to one of the buried chunks of ice she kept hitting, or to drive off a cliff into an unseen crevasse. Feeling her feet turn numb, enduring those shooting pains in her hands again as she fought to keep control of the EEV. 

When the display began to flicker and her beacon died away, Molly kept going, fighting down panic and trying to keep the vehicle moving in a straight line. Then the engine thumped and died, and Molly rattled to a stop. She sat quietly for a long minute, numb.

Then she looked up and saw a white glow pulsing in the distance, though the whirling snow. Could it be? Was she hallucinating? Molly stumbled from the driver’s seat and wallowed forward in the unfamiliar gravity, fighting the stiffness of the suit with the last of her strength until she reached the light. It was a floodlight, and under it rose a smooth, vertical surface. 

Arbitrarily, she moved to the right, leaning on the wall’s solidity, until she came to a pair of sealed doors. She pounded with both fists, screamed incoherently through cracked lips. And the last thing she saw before she blacked out was a streak of warm light and the crowding press of a dozen silently shouting faces. 

***

Molly came awake with a jolt, nearly falling off the narrow bed she was lying on and letting out a hoarse cry. A woman in medical blues rushed to her side, held her down with warm hands to keep her thick blankets in place.

“There, there, love,” the woman said, her voice full of London, so sweetly familiar. “You’re going to be all right. Try to stay calm---“

“My…my husband,” Molly croaked, clutching at the woman’s arms. “He’s still out there. You have to send someone, find him. Please.”

The woman’s brown eyes filled with pity. “Oh, my dear. I’ll call the director right away, but…well.” Stepping away from Molly, the woman pressed a comm button on the wall. “Stephen, please come to the Med Bay now. She’s woken up. Asking after her man.”

“Please.” Molly fell back into her blankets, almost hating herself for being warm, when Khan must be so cold…

A tall man, his face lined with care and long labor, entered the little room and moved to her bedside. Gently, he took her hand. 

“I’m Stephen Harris, station leader, and this is Doctor Warner,” he said, echoing the woman’s London inflections. “You’re in Terraforming Station 1399, what we here call the Sky Scrubber. You made it here twelve hours ago---“

“Twelve hours?” Molly pulled her hand free, covered her face in anguish. “No…”

“---and six hours ago, a man piloting a Starfleet scout ship landed in our hangar,” Mr. Harris continued.

“Jim? Was it Jim Kirk?” Molly clutched at her blankets. “Did he find Khan?”

“Hi, Molls,” said Jim from the door, looking haggard and sad. “Um…I’m really sorry.”

“Jim—oh, god. Why are you saying that…?”

Jim crossed the room to sit beside Mr. Harris, bent to kiss Molly’s cheek. “I arrived in time to see the wreck of the starship. The heat map around the station showed me Marcus had torpedoed a wide swath of ground, but still I had to try looking for you both. I scoured the landscape for life signs…for hours, Molly. Then I used the heat sensor, and found him.”

“He was alive? Jim…”

“He was barely warmer than the surrounding blizzard. As it was I almost missed him. Molly, I’m so sorry. He’s gone.”

A miserable silence descended onto the little room, broken only by Molly’s sobs. 

Abruptly, Molly looked up, her eyes hot. “I want to see him.” 

“Molly…” Doctor Warner leaned over her, pressed her gently back. “Let’s let her sleep for now,” she said to the men, and picked up a hypospray.

“No.” Molly pushed away the doctor’s hand and sat up. “I want to see him, please. Right now.”

In a few minutes, Molly was limping into another room that held a jumble of medical equipment---the display still aglow over an assortment of discarded tubes, toweling, and half-full bottles of fluid. An insulated suit lay in one corner, crumpled and empty, next to the remains of Khan’s familiar black clothing, hastily cut open and thrown aside. And in the center of it all lay a still figure on a gurney, covered by a drape. 

“We gave up only a half-hour before you woke,” Doctor Warner said gently. “There was no response to anything we did, no vital signs at all.” She crossed to the gurney and drew a table out of Molly’s way, then took hold of the drape. “Are you sure, Molly?”

Hugging herself with her arms, Molly nodded stubbornly. Doctor Warner drew back the drape to reveal Khan’s still, marble-white face. His blue eyes were open and staring overhead. 

Molly came close beside him and laid a hand on his cold jaw, smoothed back the spiky wet tangle of his black hair. 

“I love you too,” she whispered against his cheek. “I figured it out too late, but it’s still true. I’m going to have this baby, Khan,” she told those empty eyes, fiercely, deciding in an instant. “I’m going to love her more than anything, and I’m going to tell her all about her daddy and how he saved us. How he saved her mama so many times, and even healed her hands…”

Molly fell silent. Her brow knitted with tension, and she stood back from Khan’s body and looked wildly around. “Doctor Warner!”

“What?” The doctor rushed over. “What’s the matter?”

“I need a fluid-transfer hypospray,” Molly said, barely allowing herself to hope. Could it work?

“A hypospray? But, Molly…” 

“And I need perfusion support, electrolyte channel stimulators, and a Cyclicon infusion. But first the hypospray. Please.” She held out a hand.

“But---we already tried---”

“Doctor Warner, I need you to trust me. I can’t risk the time it’d take to explain, but Khan’s a special sort of human. His cells regenerate and survive like you can’t imagine. I’ve seen it in action more than once.” Molly took the instrument from Doctor Warner and adjusted its setting.

“Even if that were true,” said Doctor Warner, looking dubiously at Khan’s still form, “there’s not a spark left in that body. All his cells are dead, frozen.”

“Not all of them,” Molly replied, rolling up her sleeve with shaking fingers and pressing the hypospray to her own arm. “Some of his cells are still alive.”

***

Pain…pain and numbness. A gray place, so familiar, yet alien. A place that was once his fortress, his seat of power, but was now stripped bare and deserted. A place where his small self ran endlessly, aimlessly, through echoing halls. He was a child once more, not afraid of this new pain but only forlorn, lost, hearing nothing but the sound of his own little feet.

Light creaking in past the grayness, too bright, and a multitude of voices sounding in the higher halls, too far away to understand. Unwelcome, this cacophony of sensation, more pain for his ears. He’d come so close to the silent place. It hurt so much to be called away.

Why must it hurt so much? He was tired to death of hurting, of running these halls, of grieving alone. His mother, did he have a mother, ever, still? He missed her so badly. He just wanted to go home.

And why couldn’t he? He’d done all that was needful, all he could, but still he’d come to the place where all the paths had ended. And so he’d lain down in the swirling whiteness and waited for the cold, waited to sink into sleep. 

It meant something, that final act. With his death he could save her life. He’d held that thought carefully, behind his closing eyes. She who had given him so much…he could give her a future free of him. It was right. He could do that for her. 

But he felt her lips on his cheek, heard her voice in his ear. When he opened his eyes, he found he could see her face close by. She was weeping, though she smiled through her tears, excitedly mouthing words he could not quite hear. She lived, then. That was good. It was enough.


	10. Chapter 10

“This should be impossible, Jim. No, it _is_ impossible. He can’t have really been frozen---“

“Bones, he was stone dead. I’m telling you. I don’t have to be a doc to figure out that a body temp of negative two hundred would kill a guy.”

“But he’s sitting right there. Not dead, Jim.”

“Right, and maybe we shouldn’t talk about him like he’s not there? Obviously he doesn’t want to have this conversation right now. Come on, let’s…”

Khan gave the smallest of exhales and kept staring out the window, ignoring the babble of the two men behind him, not caring when the door closed and their voices faded. He rested his eyes on the cypress trees below, the deep crisp green of their foliage, their twisted, reaching branches, and on the restless motion of the sea beyond. 

This hospital tower was built on high ground, its wide windows facing out over the sea of rooftops, the faraway beach. Later, the sun would burn off the fog that now blanketed this peninsular city, and after that, it would lower toward the horizon to be snuffed in the cold waters of the Pacific. Day after day after day. He’d still be here in this room, learning to walk again. Healing. And grieving. 

He heard the door open once more, close again. Faint footfalls behind him, small hands on his shoulders, still so tentative. 

“Khan,” Molly said in her quiet way. He could feel her trembling. “I have something I need to ask you.”

***

His body had been slowly repairing itself since Titan, three months ago now. First his senses had returned, dull and fragmented as his nerves and neural connections were renewed, cell by cell. Then there came a time when he could feel his body, but not move or speak, and he had been unable to tell anyone about the endless, merciless pain that consumed his entire awareness. It had been Molly who had noticed his elevated heart rate and the fact that he was no longer able to sleep, Molly who had given the medication that eased him into relief and rest. 

By that time, the two of them had been making their slow way back to Earth, in a tubby, maddeningly sluggish mining ship that was nominally under the command of this Jim Kirk. Who, it transpired, had left Earth without authorization in order to save them, and was still in disgrace. Khan was given to understand that this “command” was something of a punishment for the brash young officer. To his credit, Kirk had accepted his fate with a good grace, and divided the lengthy voyage between entertaining the crew with his stories and, rumor had it, seducing a few young women while he was at it. 

At least Molly was safe from Kirk’s predations. She had volunteered to escort Khan back to Starfleet Headquarters, though half the time she was beside him in Sickbay in a bed of her own. She’d look over at him, her face pale as she rode out bouts of nausea so severe that she could not keep down liquids, and she had smiled. Actually smiled in his direction, and spoke words that seemed calming, encouraging.

Khan hadn’t been able to hear her, then. His hearing had been the last of his senses to return, and by that time he’d begun to study the tools and technologies used by the deaf. When at last he began to notice voices, the computer’s soft beeps, the hum of the slow impulse engines, there had finally been a reason to clear his rusty throat and try to speak again. By then, many of the Sickbay and Security people had gotten into the habit of talking about him, over him, as if he still could not hear. So he spoke only to Molly. 

He asked her what this “inquest” was, that everyone around him kept referring to in the future tense. And Molly had gently explained that he, Khan, was to be part of a general inquiry into the activities of the late Admiral Marcus’s Section 31, investigating the hows and whys of his covert weapons design program and the events that followed from it. Molly herself would be one of the witnesses, as would Thomas Harewood. 

Khan had shuddered to hear that. Molly would soon find out how Khan had strong-armed Harewood into agreeing to bomb the Archive. Better she should hear it now, he thought. So Khan had explained, haltingly, about the sick little girl and how he’d offered her father a cure in exchange for a suicide mission. 

And Molly had grown still and grave, and had not spoken to him for a long while. Two nights later, in the small hours after midnight, she’d quietly asked Khan if he’d known how wrong it was. 

“I did,” he’d said, bowing his head under the weight of it. “I was a father, once.” 

And of course she remembered the trigger phrase he’d set for the self-destruct mechanism, and had asked him to explain. So Khan had told her about his five beloved children and the women who had agreed to bear them, whom he’d selected for their strength and health among the many who offered themselves to their ruler. 

Knowing the dangers the women faced carrying an Augment’s child, he would not allow any of them to have more than one baby by him, though most had chosen to remain his lovers. They’d had to be vigilant with their primitive hormonal contraception; if the woman ovulated at all in a given month, she would nearly always become pregnant.

Telling all this to Molly as she lay in her bed, her face so pale with her sickness, made him burn with shame. “I’m sorry,” he told her again. “I should have better explained it, that first night.”

“Yes, you should have,” she replied quietly. “But your children, Khan. What happened to them, before you left Earth and went into cryosleep?”

“They were killed,” he said tonelessly. “Their mothers as well. My compound was bombed. My enemies…they waited until I was elsewhere. To send me a message.” He turned his face to the wall.

“Khan,” she whispered, and drew back her coverlet. He heard her bare feet on the floor, and then she was slipping into his bed and drawing him into her arms. To his own astonishment, Khan turned toward Molly, laid his head on her breast, and wept openly before another person for the first time in his life.

***

Molly twiddled the stiff collar of her new, larger uniform and shuffled her feet on the carpet outside the hearing room. She swallowed, her mouth gone so dry; she folded her fingers together in front of her swelling belly, then decided not to do that; too awkward. 

Her eyes flickered to the clock. Nearly time to meet with the fleet admiral. This time, she devoutly hoped, the real one. 

The heavy doors opened, and a functionary beckoned Molly inside. She stepped forward carefully, then fought down a gasp at the sight of not just the fleet admiral, but ten Starfleet admirals gathered around a great table. 

“Please have a seat, Miss Hooper. Ah, pardon me. It’s Doctor Hooper, isn’t it.” The fleet admiral glanced down at his PADD. 

“Yes. Hello, yes, thank you.” Blushing hotly, Molly dropped into her chair, feeling like a little girl as she discreetly adjusted the seat.

“And you’ve come here on behalf of Khan Noonien Singh. Is that correct, Doctor Hooper?” The fleet admiral squinted at her.

“Yes,” she said, squaring her shoulders and leaning forward. Her voice gathered confidence as she continued. “I’m here to ask for clemency for him, in light of his unique circumstances and his treatment by Admiral Marcus. I wasn’t asked all of the right questions during my deposition, but I really feel you need to know everything before you decide….what to do with him.” Her voice faltered.

A low murmur rose around the dim room; several of the admirals conferred quietly before one of them addressed Molly. 

“Young lady,” she said, her gray hair reflecting the blue glow of the display, “we already have this Khan’s testimony. He admitted his intent to bomb the Kelvin Memorial Archive---“

“But he didn’t, did he?” Molly blurted, but pressed on before she could admonish herself. “He changed his mind. Nobody died after all.”

“He did it to save your life, is what I gathered.” The fleet admiral glanced down at Molly’s belly. 

“I put a tracker in his clothes,” Molly said, “and followed him that morning. Because I was worried about him. He’d been poisoned, and he seemed unstable.”

“In your professional opinion,” asked another admiral, a Vulcan, “was Khan’s mental function affected by the lead poisoning?”

“Without a doubt,” Molly replied, sure of her footing now. “Lead is a potent neurotoxin. I’ve seen the effects of acute lead poisoning in my work as a pathologist, and it’s not pretty. The dose that Khan took would have killed ten men. His mind is so far beyond average that it’s hard to measure or even define how he was affected, but I’m sure he was. I’m certain it disturbed his judgment.”

“And the poison was Admiral Marcus’s doing,” the Vulcan said. “We knew that. And Marcus found his ship, woke him up, and extorted design work from him under threat to his crew.”

“His family,” Molly said. “Those were his brothers and sisters who died on Titan. Marcus wanted rid of the Augments, and to leave no evidence behind. Can you imagine,” she asked the room, her voice softening, “what it would be like to watch everyone you’d ever cared about die in that way?”

More muttering from the admirals. Molly decided to press her advantage. 

“Khan is more alone than any person in existence,” she said, speaking directly to the fleet admiral. “His children were killed in an airstrike three centuries ago. Three centuries to us, but no more than a year to Khan. He’s been kidnapped, assaulted, tormented, poisoned, chased across the solar system, and frozen nearly to death. He’s suffered so much,” she pleaded. “Please grant him some leniency, that’s all I ask.”

“Do you deny that this man is dangerous?” The fleet admiral’s lined face was grim. “By your own testimony, even the Archive’s brig couldn’t hold him for long, once he decided to break out.”

“Then wouldn’t it be safest not to try to hold him at all? To have him on your side?” Molly straightened her back, sat up taller in her seat. “I do have an idea,” she told the room. “There’s something he could offer Starfleet, the whole Federation in fact, in exchange for a fresh start.”

The fleet admiral frowned and tilted his head, curious. “Tell us.”

***

“I have something I need to ask you.” Molly’s voice was as soft as the fog outside Khan’s window. “Two things, really.”

Khan took her hand, drew her down to the seat beside him. She staggered a little as she sat; her belly was already large, though she was only four months gone. He pressed her little hand, feeling helpless. 

“Are you well, Molly?” he couldn’t help asking. “Is the baby---“ 

“I’m all right, Khan.” Tenderly, she touched her roundness. “My life isn’t in danger.”

He settled back in his chair with a scowl, and cracked the knuckles of one hand. “Good.”

Molly raised an eyebrow, perhaps about to ask him who he thought he could punch in order to safeguard her health, but instead she said, “I’ve just been to talk to Starfleet brass.”

“You threatened as much. What did you tell them?”

“The truth.” Molly glanced at him, then out at the gray horizon. “About everything that happened to you. I asked for clemency. And Khan, they’re prepared to give it---”

“In exchange for what?” He looked at her sharply. “There will be a price.”

“In exchange for your blood,” Molly said in a rush. “And permission to study your cells, your DNA and RNA. We could advance medical science by leaps and bounds. You healed that little girl, Lucille. Why not help others?”

He frowned. “I’m in Starfleet custody. They’ll do what they like with me. They won’t ask my permission.”

Molly pressed her lips together sadly. “I…I see why you would believe that. Marcus always used you as he wished, after all. But Khan, he was a renegade. Starfleet as a whole is _not_ like him, or I wouldn’t belong. They do need your permission. You’ve the right to bodily autonomy, Khan, like everyone else. In return, they’re prepared to offer you your freedom.” 

Khan was silent a moment, pondering this. “I could go where I like? Do…what _I_ want?”

“As long as it’s legal,” Molly said in a small voice, but Khan was already thinking of the great libraries he’d heard of, the new technologies yet unexplored, and, in a corner of his mind, the wide green countryside of England, where he had been a boy. Did that place still exist? Could he find it again?

“Sussex Downs,” he said under his breath, then again, louder. “Sussex Downs---I want to live there. And I want to work in London, with access to its universities. For that they can have all the blood I can spare.”

“So you agree?” The fine lines around Molly’s eyes were relaxing, even as her face broke into a smile. 

“I do. As long as I’m truly free.” 

Molly pulled him close, held him tightly; he could hear her sniffling. This woman, this tiny, softhearted woman who had done so much for him. He’d be dead without her, three times over.

“What was the second thing you wanted to ask me?” he murmured into her hair. 

“Oh.” Molly drew back, and her face grew as red as he’d ever seen it. “It’s about…you and me. And the baby. Do you remember…wh-what you said on Titan, before you left the EEV?” 

Khan inhaled. “I do remember.”

“Um.” Molly’s face crumpled, and she rubbed away a tear. “Were you j-just saying that to comfort me or…is it…true?”

“Molly!” Khan cupped her face between his hands. “Of course. It was always true. Always will be. How could you doubt it?”

“It’s just…you left me behind. In the hotel room. And in the blizzard.” Her tears were flowing freely now. “And after, when you were alive again, I didn’t know whether you wanted me near or just…needed me.”

“I will always need you, Molly.” Khan looked into her wet eyes, near tears himself. “But don’t you feel you’d be better off without me in your life? All I seem to do is take from you…put you in harm’s way.” Gingerly, he placed a hand on her belly. 

“M-maybe I want to give.” Molly held his hand firmly in place. “I made a choice, Khan. I want this baby. And I want you. Khan…will you…”

“…Marry me?” He looked at her in disbelief. “Would you? Live with me, stay with me? Make a new family?” 

“Yes,” she replied, her face alight. “Oh, yes!”

“Molly. My Molly.” He kissed her face over and over, tasting her tears, feeling his heart bound inside him as strongly as ever.

“Yes. Yours.” 

“…Mine.” His hand closed on her wrist, hard. 

Her eyes slipped closed; her lips parted. “Yes.” 

What was this incredible feeling in his breast? Was it happiness? The thrill of possession? He would be free, and Molly was his, forever. His to love openly, without fear, in the sight of all the world.

And as that truth suffused him, Khan suddenly wanted nothing more than to push his woman to her knees and open his trousers. Or throw her over his bed, make her cry and scream and struggle as she loved to do until he forced her into ecstasy. 

“Oh, my Molly. What I would do to you if I could.” He gazed down at her, unsmiling, dark promises hovering on his lips.

She gasped, leaning into his body. “And why not? It’s been so long…”

“The child. Surely you aren’t allowed…” 

“Khan.” Molly sat up, put an indignant hand on her hip. “I’m healthy. And our little girl is fine. I’m big, yes, but we’re managing it. I keep telling you, medical care has improved just a bit since your day.”

“My day, is it,” Khan growled, then shot a black look at Molly’s laugh. 

“Sorry,” she said, covering her smile. “It’s just---it’s so good to see you glowering again. You’re healing, Khan. Body and spirit.”

“I’m a long way from whole,” he said, indicating the walking stick beside his chair. “Body or spirit.”

“You’ll get there,” Molly told him softly. “It’ll take time. You came back from the dead, after all.”

“And you brought me back.” Khan laced long fingers into Molly’s hair and bent her face down to his. “At first I wasn’t sure whether I should bless your quick wit, or curse it.”

“What would you say now?” Molly breathed against his mouth, sending a frisson of lust down his spine. 

“I’d say…” He took a breath, smelled her warm skin, the salt air. “I’d say that you’re making it possible that life…could be worth living. Finally.”

“I’m so glad, Khan,” she replied, and kissed him. 

His hand closed in her hair, tugging, releasing. “Lock the door,” he whispered. 

As if in a trance, Molly rose to obey, returning to find him standing next to the bed, which he had lowered as far as it would go. “Undress,” he ordered her. 

His woman opened the clasps of her uniform, stripping away formality and rank, leaving only Molly standing before him, her round belly standing proudly out. He’d done that. And the life that boiled in Khan’s veins at the sight of her: she’d given that life back to him. 

Khan held his breath in wonder as Molly knelt on the pristine floor and looked beseechingly up at him with her beautiful brown eyes. Needing no clearer invitation, Khan stepped forward, carefully, touching the bed for balance. He opened his trousers, freed his straining cock. “Pleasure me, promised wife.” 

Ah, the warmth of her mouth as she drew him between her wet lips, that clever tongue moving in mysterious, delightful ways over his length. Oh, her shudder as he took a heavy handful of her hair, relishing his control, this power over her that she gave freely. 

Soon he was panting at the gorgeous sight of her efforts as she wriggled naked at his feet, making tiny sounds of need deep in her throat as she worked to please him. “Stop,” he told her, rather breathlessly, pulling her off his now-aching cock. “Get on the bed. On your side.”

He couldn’t wait to undress; he’d savor her silky skin later. He clambered swiftly up to lie behind her, careless of his shoes on the clean linen, took hold of her arse as she gasped in surprise, and thrust his steely cock inexorably into her wet heat. A moan broke out of her lovely throat; he hunched his body to drive inside her and set his teeth on the side of her neck. 

Carefully, he bit into her flesh, leaving his mark, loving her shiver. “Have you missed your Khan, my Molly?” he purred against the pinkening mark. 

Her only reply was a whimper of assent, her small hand reaching back to the place where his thigh met his buttock, her nails rasping on the fabric of his trousers as she urged him on. She’d reached up her other hand to brace against the headboard. A wise precaution. She knew him well. 

Khan leaned as far over her as he dared, impatiently shoving his trousers farther down. He kept most of his weight off her body even as he ground his cock into that hungry pussy of hers, reveling in the sight of Molly arching back to offer herself, to give him more. He snaked his hand around her body and plucked at the tiny pearl of her clitoris. 

“Say you’re mine, Molly,” he growled, pitching his voice low and savage. “Tell me. Whose woman are you now?” 

“All yours, Khan,” she cried; releasing the bed frame and splaying her fingers back to lace into his. “I’m yours, I’m yours, forever---“

Khan exulted, confident by the quiver in her thighs that her release was close. With one final thrust he gave in to his orgasm, letting her feel him come, then groaning low into her ear as her pleasure answered his. With a soft wail, she tightened and pulsed around him. 

“Love you,” she whispered as they relaxed into rest, turning her head back to kiss his mouth. 

He breathed in her words, sighed them back into her lungs, tender as his fingertips on her cheek. “I love you. Molly. Thank you…”

***

Molly stood on the high hill among springtime’s blue and yellow flowers, shading her eyes with one hand to watch the two figures dashing around each other far below. She’d chosen to walk up here to be alone with her thoughts while her husband and little girl played in the glen. She’d left them paddling in the reeds at the creekside; now, it seemed, they’d discovered the delights of the jeweled dragonflies that whizzed around the slower water upstream. 

Her daughter’s delighted shrieks wafted up to Molly’s ears, and she watched the black-haired child leap onto her father from behind, taking him by surprise. Obligingly, Khan tumbled forward into the green grass, ending up on his back with Adalet laughing down at him from where he held her above him in the air.

Gratitude filled Molly. Gratitude for her husband’s full recovery, for her daughter’s exuberance and curiosity, for the work that filled her days with meaning, and for the new little life that had sparked secretly inside her. Molly smiled. She’d tell Khan tonight after Adalet was sound asleep, so they could celebrate as he’d surely wish.

Molly raised her eyes to the blue English sky, wondering what her life would be like if she had backed away from that compelling stranger five years ago. She might still have married someone, still become a mother. But she could not imagine her life without the little family she’d built. Nor would she trade anything for the deep contentment she’d found with her discovery, at the new Lucille Harewood Institute for Regenerative Medicine, that was giving hope to people with diseases formerly deemed incurable. 

All the uncertainty, all the fear, every moment she’d had to struggle to survive…it had all been worth it. And though she knew her husband would always grieve for his lost family, Molly was happy in the knowledge that she and Adalet---and now, the child to come---had brought him treasures he’d never truly had: joy and peace. Molly watched the white clouds drifting by, and breathed in the warm, good scent of the earth below her feet.

Voices broke into her reverie. They were shouting up at her now, the deep voice and the high, waving arms and pointing to the picnic basket Adalet had insisted on lugging into the park. And Molly grinned, waved back, and started down the hill.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> .....Okay, wow, so that got a little out of hand there, this fic that was supposed to be just one chapter! Oops I accidentally a space opera? Blame the incomparable miz-joely, as usual.  
>  Thank you so much to all my readers and Tumblr folks who encouraged me to continue this story, especially faye-tale who gave the original prompt. The Prisoner has been a hell of a ride, and I hope you all enjoyed reading it even one-tenth as much as I enjoyed writing it.  
> Big hugs, and may there be canon Khanolly in heaven! ;)

**Author's Note:**

> Come and play with me on Tumblr! I'm very nice :D


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